After getting a official word from the management, Project Natal's launch has been announced as coming before Christmas, and with this, more details have started flowing. Most of them come from the CES 2010, and some are more interesting than others. New Scientist has been awarded the honor of an actual demonstration of Natal at work, and its reporter has even received some exact technical details.
According to Project Natal's lead developer, Alex Kipman, “Natal consumes just 10 to 15 per cent of the Xbox's computing resources and it can recognise any pose in just 10 milliseconds. It needs only 160 milliseconds to latch on to the body shape of a new user stepping in front of it.” He further explains that, “The system locates body parts to within a 4-centimetre cube [...].
That's far less precise than lab-based systems or the millimetre precision of Hollywood motion capture. But Douglas Lanman, who works on markerless 3D interaction at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and is not involved with Natal, says that this will likely be accurate enough for gamers.”
While that general statement is rather discouraging, and somewhat hurtful as well, it looks like Microsoft's Natal will get its own “Motion Plus” sometime in the future as well. As for the part in which it is revealed that the controller will take up some of the Xbox 360's processing power, it looks like this could be an actual problem. While 10, 15% may not sound like much, there are a lot of developers out there that push the console to its very limits, making their games so that every last bit of available resource can be put to use. So, the top-of-the-line, high-end games of tomorrow may prove to be too much to run at the same time as Natal on an Xbox 360.
Another thing that may have been revealed at the CES 2010 is that Project Natal will no longer have an incorporated processor of its own. At E3 2009, the controller's description read that, “Project Natal combines an RGB camera, depth sensor, multiarray microphone and custom processor running proprietary software,” while the CES 2010 description has been narrowed down, and the “custom processor” has been entirely dropped.
Another thing that Kipman explains about Natal is that the system relies on a “50-megabyte software package that can recognize 31 different body parts in any video frame” that will even be able to tell if you're holding your hand behind your back, as opposed to automatically calling 911, believing that you've just lost an arm. Still, the true question behind this statement is which are these 31 body parts, because a simple mind can't really come up with that number by simply staring at the mirror and pondering.
I want that racing game on the E3 video
