Project Natal

[RichardCranium]

In the early 1990s my boss and I were demoing a new system we were developing and taking it round the bazaars for feedback.

I had knocked up a prototype consisting of screen images with some fields where you type free text and then press ENTER to go forward to the next screen in the script.

We were getting lots of lovely feedback and suggestions and I was becoming convinced that this new Rapid Applications Development thing might actually work.

Then we got to the Accounts Department.

One of the directors (it is a quango so it has lots of directors) in Accounts could not grasp the idea that this was a prototype. We both explained very carefully and slowly while his colleagues looked at each other in amused puzzlement but he just could not get it. He could not be made to understand that he was not seeing the finished product.

I even tried my standard analogy of using the car industry who carve 'cars' out of wood and plastic foam to see how they perform in the wind tunnel and he also could not grasp how these fake cars were not real cars that you could just drive around.


I would have expected better of people in CUK: to understand even Microsoft cannot demo software that has not been written. Of course it's a video of the concept, FFS. Have you no grasp or experience of systems development? How do you think it works?

[AtW]

I would have expected better of people in CUK: to understand even Microsoft cannot demo software that has not been written. Of course it's a video of the concept, FFS. Have you no grasp or experience of systems development? How do you think it works?

It's like saying they can demo how Death Star will look like, how it would fire lazers and stuff, but not actually having technology in the first place to achieve it and maybe not having it for next 10 years?

Either Microsoft have technology to do it or they don't - otherwise it's the same as showing 3DMax rendered video of how a real-time 3D game will look like without having 3D engine.

[Bunk]

one developer in particular is on the lookout for people of various "dimensions" to assist with testing.

More importantly, will you have to put your sausage roll down to get it working?

[voodooflux]

More importantly, will you have to put your sausage roll down to get it working?

I never put a sausage roll down.

[vetran]

They desperately need to find something to compete with the wii remote, Natal is it. OK the first few versions will be a little buggy, you may need to wear reference point arm leg bands (that seems to be de rigeur for the professional systems) but a remote free experience will be a winner. Cue sales of 360 small arms remotes etc.

Its NEW technology so initial versions are going to be buggy.

[AtW]

you may need to wear reference point arm leg bands (that seems to be de rigeur for the professional systems) but a remote free experience will be a winner. Cue sales of 360 small arms remotes etc.

So you will have many remotes to be attached to your body but it will be otherwise remote free operation?

[voodooflux]

...you may need to wear reference point arm leg bands...

Apparently not, according to Newscientist...

A player standing anywhere between 0.8 and 4 metres from Natal is illuminated with infrared light. A monochrome video camera records how much of that light they reflect, using the brightness of the signal to approximate their distance from the device and capture their movements in 3D.

This means Natal doesn't require users to wear markers on their body - unlike the technology used by movie studios to animate CGI figures.

[Clippy]

Sony's rival motion controller needs a serious makeover.

Either that or they should sell it via Ann Summers stores!

[vetran]

I realise the intention is not to use these in Natal but as discussed above there are inherent issues with just using infra red. I suspect they may have to drop back to armbands.

[deckster]

Note that an awful lot of this technology comes out of the MS Research labs in Cambridge. For those that don't know, MS set the lab up specifically to take the brightest people from the university, and they have effectively created a 'super-lab' which combines the brains of some of the best computer science researchers in the world with the resources of Microsoft.

When was a computer science undergrad at Cambridge 15 years ago, there was already a massive amount of research being done by some exceedingly clever people into 3D displays, motion tracking and the like. I truly cannot imagine what they might have come up with given Bill Gates' wallet and 15 years.

Now let's just mentally re-run the press releases with 'Cambridge University researchers' rather than 'Microsoft', as that's really what's happened. I have no idea if the claims made in the video are realistic, but if anybody can do it, these guys will have done.