I see. I wonder whether motion controls make lag more or less noticeable. If it's something like IR aiming or mouse control, lag should be very noticeable, and in the Natal breakout videos it looks noticeable, but of course that's not from the perspective of the person who's playing.

Couldnt have said it better myself

I would think for games that use an avatar on-screen that is based on your body, it would definitely be more noticable than a controller.

Going beyond the fact that the guy is a PS fanboy (or at least a Wii hater as he has no praise words for the one motion controler that has an analog stick that he praised too)


Doesn't the Arc use a camera (for the ball thingy) and a wireless controler ?

That means, similar optical recognition lag as Natal added to wireless lag? (wireless means encoding, travel, decoding, it's significantly laggier than wired connections).
Do we have to add lag in hardware motion detection which the arc will use? or does it use only the camera, making it at least as laggy as Natal on the hardware side?


Even button presses coupled to electric signal in a 3 feet wire will lag more than light to 1 feet wired receptor.... the only lag natal can have is software recognition of the signal, and that is something that can be worked on by improving the code and/or the processing unit.


My point is, there is no reason for Natal to have a noticable lag once the software is finalized.

Not necessarily.  I'm an Xbox 360 owner and I'm expecting Natal to flop, especially on the games front.  It might be cool to control my dashboard with just my hands, but only temporarily.  When it comes down to it, it's just plain easier to use a controller.  Don't get me wrong, I don't think the PS Arc-whatever will fair much better but at least it uses a controller. 

I don't think the OP is created out of jealousy but out of skepticism.  But either way it's always interesting to hear a developer's take on new technology.

the real kicker is that as Natal stands now more complex the game the more lag there will be, so most of the games are going to be simple mini-games like the ones everyone hates on the Wii. the time that it takes to process the image data and then convert the results into onscreen actions for a game is always going to be slower than button 1 pressed so execute action, no matter how good the software is. not to mention the perceived lag generated by the difference in time it takes to perform a physical action with your body like punching vs pressing a button.

But in saying that Natal does have a lot of potential to bring a lot of new ideas into gaming, but since the eyetoy/PlayStation eye the Wii and all the other motion controllers over the years haven't really changed much I doubt we will see much more for Natal no matter how much more advanced it is.

I agree with the assessment by the director in the article, there is naturally going to be a lag, its just the way video systems work. From the initial synapse of movement, there is a processing of visual data that would be delayed slightly behind the person's action. How significant is what remains to be seen.

As for Sony Arc/Gem, the limiting factor remains the lack of a movement system via thumbstick. The latest images show that one has not been added.

Which is about 3* that of the wireless controller. Still, most games would probably have acceptable latency considering there are games which are almost 200ms on the PS3.

Underlined is just plain wrong.  They already said no matter what the game, it will use ~10-15% of the resources.  The software and data used from Natal will always use about that amount.  It doesn't matter if you are overlaying the skeleton with say a Gears of War character or if it is just an Avatar, the "lag" will be the same as all the processing related to Natal and it's data will always have that amount of dedicated resources to use.

Also, if it really is faster than pressing a button, then why does it have less input lag than many games using controllers?  Killzone 2 and Halo 3  both have worse input lag than Natal at this point.

Arc uses PSEye for positioning (like Natal), and responds to lights on the ball for pointing/direction.

If the RE5 Arc demo is anything to go by, it's noticeably more laggy than Wii IR was for RE4.