Archive for January, 2010

Project Natal Parody

This parody has nothing to do with Milo. It is a parody of most aspects of the original Project Natal announcement video. It’s very funny:

More Milo and Kate Parodies

Here are some more well-made Milo and Kate parody videos. Some of these spoofs are very humorous:

Milo and Kate Parody

Here is a humorous parody video by IGN Originals of Peter Molyneux’s game Milo and Kate for Project Natal on the Xbox 360:

Milo and Kate by Lionhead Studios

At E3, Microsoft also showed stunning video of the Project Natal game “Milo and Kate” by Peter Molyneux of Lionhead Studios, for the Xbox 360. It was also demoed to some reporters and lucky individuals. The boy is called Milo (or Milly if you choose a girl), and Kate is the name of their pet dog. This video is truly awesome:

It features facial recognition, tone-of-voice recognition, some simple speech recognition, recognition of the colour of your clothes, head-tracked perspective, gesture recognition, augmented reality with your real reflection showing in the rippling lake along with virtual objects, and recognition of when you are holding up a sheet of paper to the camera. While it can see and recognise what’s on the piece of paper, and insert the paper into the virtual world, it has been confirmed that this XBox 360 game never actually does that properly, because they were worried about people drawing rude things.

One thing you might notice in the video… You can’t see Claire’s goggles that she put on, even though you can see her reflection in the water. I think the augmented reality would be better if they added in the goggles, which is perfectly possible to do with Project Natal.

“Milo and Kate” is a real game, with real objectives.

Here is an interview Peter Molyneux gave at E3 after the video was shown:

In other interviews, Peter Molyneux revealed more information. This game will automatically download updated dialogue from the internet: “For example, Milo will download dialogue very regularly behind the scenes which updates his database with current events. So, if Britain’s Got Talent is on, he’ll comment on certain acts, so that makes him feel so relevant and real that you start believing it, even if you’re a sceptic.”

He explained how it creates the illusion you’re talking to Milo: “We’re building up a profile of the emotion in your voice so we know when your voice is strained or excited or calm or passive. That coupled with Milo’s vocabulary of words he understands and what he’s doing on screen creates this illusion…”

“Milo can recognise the emotions on your face and the emotions in your voice. He can recognise certain words you say. You can have conversations with him, you can read stories to him. We’re trying to bring all these things together. Some of them are tricks – I’ll be absolutely honest with you – to make you believe Milo’s real.

He can recognise what you’re wearing. If he notices you’ve got dark bags under your eyes he will say, ‘You look tired today.’”

But there’s a catch: “The interesting thing is you can only talk to him when the Talk icon appears at the bottom of the screen. That’s when he’s listening to you; the rest of the time, he’s not. He’s listening to you because there’s a context in which you can talk to him.”

And he described the gameplay: “You can buy stuff for Milo’s world, like a bicycle or a trampoline. He’ll come back from school one day and say, ‘Oh, Alex’ – Alex is this character at school who always does a bit better than Milo – ‘Alex has got a new bike. When can we get a new bike?’

To get that bike you need to earn money by doing activities. There are three activities you can do, and the amount of time you spend on each activity sculpts your Milo in different ways – so everybody’s Milo will be completely unique to them.

If you do lots of work, your Milo will be very studious. His hair will have a side parting. He’ll be quite worried about his appearance and he won’t like to get dirty. Whereas if you do more of the play stuff with Milo, he’ll be more of a kid who goes out and scratches his knees.

Your character doesn’t have to be a boy, it can be a girl. At the start you can choose whether to be play as Milly or Milo.”

The game is planned to be ready for the release of Project Natal, and at E3 they had already implemented a large percentage of the game content.

Lionsgate Studios is the company that made the game “Black & White” which was practically the only game to support the Essential Reality P5 Virtual Reality Glove.

Project Natal Live Demonstration at E3

The 9 minute live demonstration at E3 was even more impressive, since it demonstrated the technology was already real and working.

First they showed logging in by facial recognition, then they showed how your avatar on the login screen followed your movements. Then they showed how to choose a game with hand gestures.

Then they showed the Xbox 360 Project Natal game Ricochet, where you must bounce balls off your body to destroy blocks like in Breakout.

And last they showed the game Paint Party, which will be another Project Natal game for the Xbox 360. It involves throwing paint at a canvas with hand gestures, changing colour or mode with voice commands, and making stencils with the silhouettes of your and your friends’ bodies.

Project Natal Video at E3

Microsoft first showed Project Natal to the public at E3 in June 2009. And people were stunned.

First they showed a video that they had prepared earlier, featuring a happy family playing on their XBox 360, using only their bodies, voices, and a real skateboard:

First it demonstrated recognising when a user entered the room, and which user it was. This is a confirmed feature that Project Natal will be able to do.

And it demonstrates a virtual character maintaining eye contact with the user as they walk around in front of the screen. That is also quite easy for Natal to do.

And it demonstrates the virtual character addressing the user by name in a sentence full of emotion. Which means either Microsoft has made a massive leap in speech synthesis technology; or more likely, that game makers could get their voice actors to record many of the most common names in various contexts, so users can feel personally involved. I’d like to see this more in games, even if some users with uncommon names miss out.

Then it demonstrates the virtual character responding to spoken dialog like “Let’s do it.” with an appropriate response and doing what it’s told.

Then it demonstrates how Natal could be used for 1-to-1 fighting games, where real punches, kicks, and blocks are used, and the avatar follows all the users moves perfectly. I can’t wait to try that kind of game.

Next came car racing with tracked hands steering in the air, and changing gears. I can’t see how they are controlling acceleration and braking, but Natal could do that by tracking your feet. It allowed multiplayer and didn’t get confused by others’ hands. And it allowed actual pit-work with 1-to-1 motions. That’s pretty impressive. But I suspect gamers would rather have a split-screen multiplayer racing option.

As we’d already seen, there was tracking of all your limbs in a rampage-like game. But this time they went for a mirror view rather than looking at the back of a transparent avatar. The impressive part is the roaring and breathing fire. I don’t know if that was done with the microphone or the 3D camera, but it looked cool.

Then they showed soccer with full body tracking. I can see that being popular, since sports games have always been successful with innovative but realistic controls. I’ve never been able to get into sports games much, but it was fun on the Wii.

I really like the part when the XBox 360 scans the appearance of the skateboard, and uses it as an in-game object. Users like being able to customise their game characters, but consoles have never before had an easy enough way to draw or send designs to the program. I doubt Project Natal can really project a flash of visible light onto it, but the video could be showing us the camera view as it’s displayed on the TV screen.

And the hand gestures to control the menu are good, but could get annoying if you have to go through a long list one item at a time. In real life when you spin something it has momentum, and spinning it harder makes it go faster. Unfortunately there is no haptic feedback, so there is no easy way to measure how hard someone is pushing, only how fast they are pushing.

Skateboarding games could work well, without the need of a Balance board like on the Nintendo Wii.

Then it goes back to facial recognition like at the start of the clip, to log into instant messaging, and voice commands to call someone. Who surprisingly answers the call instantly without complaining about being interrupted in the middle of something.

The video phone system looks good. But I can’t help noticing the video of your friend is in 2D. Project Natal has a 3D camera. So it wouldn’t be hard to have the friend extending out in front of the frame, especially when she does the hand gestures. It would look better on a stereoscopic 3D TV, which I really hope XBox 360 will be supporting one day, with or without Project Natal.

Since Project Natal can make a 3D scan of your whole body and use it as an avatar, the dressing up your avatar while online shopping could be useful. You could virtually try it on, and move around in it. But that would require significant effort on the part of clothes shops or manufacturers. Perhaps it would just be used for downloading clothes for your avatars.

The quiz game looks interesting, if it can do the hand tracking accurately enough to tell who pressed their “buzzer first”. But the video gets one thing wrong. The host is trying to draw out suspense with “Millard Filmore is… ” before saying “correct”, and the players are worried. But the fact that the game show host recognised the name and was able to say it back shows that the game makers programmed it in, which they wouldn’t have done for a random wrong name.

It also shows online play against another family.

And last of all, it shows a media player controlled by gestures and voice commands.