Posts Tagged ‘shopping’

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.