Posts Tagged ‘voice’

Project Natal Innovation Journey Parody

If you watched the video “Innovation Journey” from CES 2010 that I posted a while ago, then you might enjoy this parody of it: “Transformation Journey into Sameness” by ScrewAttack. If you haven’t watched the original CES video, then view Project Natal at CES 2010 first.

I think Project Natal will be great, so don’t be offended or think I am criticising Natal by posting these parodies.

For more spoof videos about Project Natal, just click on the “parody” tag below.

Façade would be great on Project Natal

The Milo and Kate game looks like really impressive technologically. But the setting of playing with a child and helping him with his homework isn’t the most interesting application for it.

Trip and Grace in their apartment in Facade

But back in 2005, a freeware PC game called Façade was released. They had similar ideas, but didn’t have such good technology.

Façade is a First Person Drama game. The aim of the game is to save the marriage of your friends Trip and Grace, while you are invited to their apartment for drinks. They will try to spend the whole night arguing with each other, and will normally get angry and want a divorce before the night is out.

You can walk around the 3D apartment with the arrow keys and look around. And you can interact with or pick up objects with the mouse. You can also hug, kiss or comfort either Trip or Grace by clicking in the appropriate place on their body.

But most importantly, you can talk to them by typing whatever you feel like saying. They will talk back to you with recorded voice samples like Milo does. Dialog is in real time, and you can interrupt other people if you want. At the start of the game you can choose your name from a list and then Grace and Trip will talk to you by name, the way Milo does. Unfortunately, “Claire” isn’t one of the names you can choose, and neither was my name: Carl. But strangely I could choose the Vietnamese name Khá, which is what half my friends call me anyway.

I found typing in real time to be too hard, especially since they don’t respond to the fact that you started typing, like a real person would when you start speaking. They wait until you press Enter. I also found they didn’t seem to respond as much to what I said as they should, and I didn’t seem as in control of what happened as I should. But it is a good effort, and it’s possible to have lots of different outcomes.

But this game would be great if Microsoft or Lionshead got together with the developers of this game and made a Project Natal version with proper speech recognition, along with tone of voice and facial expression recognition, and added more dialog possibilities. It could also do with better graphics.

You can download this game from http://www.interactivestory.net/ and experience a very different genre of gaming.

Other Japanese developers supporting Natal

Namco Bandai weren’t in the panel at TGS 2009, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t at TGS to support Project Natal.

We already saw one Namco Bandai game for the Project Natal demonstrated live for many people to try: Beautiful Katamari.

But Namco Bandai are better known for their fighting games: Tekken, SoulBlade/SoulEdge/SoulCalibur, Naruto: Ultimate Ninja, Dragon Ball Z, etc.
They’ve also produced a few baseball games over the years, and many, many other kinds of games.

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Yozo Sakagami
General Manager, Planning Unit 2
Planning Division, Contents Production Group
NAMCO BANDAI Games Inc.

“You don’t need anything but your hands. Like in Science Fiction films, where people control holographic interfaces by their hands. Being able to do this in reality is very futuristic and exciting. We have worked with motion capturing in fighting games for quite some time. Realistic movement has been one of our strongest interests.

“We were all excited, like kids with a new toy. Everyone on the team was coming up with new ideas. We talked about things like how a ball was thrown in a baseball game. We were all quite excited. In fact, it’d been a while since we had so much fun. We hadn’t encountered anything as innovative.

“On the other hand, the experience itself that people enjoy, really hasn’t changed. So it may not be about creating something that is completely new and different, but rather to deliver an experience that everyone could imagine and relate to.

“Motions and gestures are very real in form, and they are also very personal features. It’s not only about the looks, but how a person moves is also very unique. I think being able to integrate this into a game could be a big step forward.”

Tecmo are famous for their Dead Or Alive fighting games. And also for Ninja Gaiden, Fatal Frame/Project Zero, Monster Rancher, Gallop Racer, and others.
Since this interview, Tecmo has merged with Koei, so hopefully that brings Koei’s games on-board too.

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Keisuke Kikuchi
Executive Producer
Tecmo

We’ve put a lot of thought, but there’s others who do more. That’s why we keep putting more thoughts into it. We want to do better than them. Our team has started planning for games to play on Natal and we came up with 72 ideas all together. When we saw these ideas, we started seeing a trend. My first impression was to become something in a game, but as we went on, we started seeing these ideas in categories.

For example, let’s say there is a small wall. In real life, you do a little jump over this wall. But if your character jumps to the 2nd floor of a building, it makes you feel as if you really were jumping that high.

This is more about the physical experience, but the experience as a whole. I am thinking about a content where you interact physically, and enjoy a more intimate experience within the game.

From Software were also interviewed. They are the developers of a couple of my favourite games: Tenchu and Armored Core.

I can just imagine playing Tenchu and accidentally making a sound in the real world and having the guards you are trying to sneak past hear you and try to catch you. I did find some of the gestures in the Wii version of Tenchu disturbing though, such as having to mime breaking someone’s neck.

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Masanori Takeuchi
Managing Director / Game Producer
FromSoftware, Inc.

“I think Natal is beyond the concept of any existing game. With Natal, I thought that we’d be able to do something new on Xbox 360 again. I honestly thought it was going to be a lot of fun.

I think Natal is more about enhancing the experience. If evolution would leave behind our current fans, I want to be careful not to do so. I hope to expand the current gaming experience, rather than to evolve gaming into something irrelevant to current gamers.

Things like movement and facial expressions could not be reflected into the game through a handheld controller. But with Natal, this becomes possible.

I believe Natal will become very interesting, when combined with games that work with the players’ emotions.”

Kojima are the developers of Metal Gear Solid. But they also made Boktai. Boktai was a revolutionary gameboy advance game that uses a solar sensor as an input device, along with a clock. The game character had a solar gun that he used to shoot vampires, but the gun only charged when the player was outdoors in the sunlight. The stronger the sunlight, the faster your gun charged. Sunlight also affected other things in the game, such as slowly rotting fruit and nuts in your inventory. Sometimes in the game darkness is preferable. Time also affected things in game. That gives you an idea of where they are coming from.

They also made the game PoliceNauts for some ancient consoles, which was unusual in that it supported various console peripherals such as Mice and Lightguns.

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Kenichiro Imaizumi
Senior Producer
Kojima Productions

During our previous production, we tried to build our own controller. We ran a lot of experiments. We tried running electric shockwaves, install a pulse reader, we also tried to build a controller that’s receptive to the strength of the grip. We tried a lot, even a transforming controller. Kojima came up with these ideas, and we worked directly with the manufacturer.

But all the way along, we thought we had to have a controller. And now Natal tells us that we don’t need a controller. We can use our movements, our voice, or the recognition of colours. That’s how we interact with games. It was quite revolutionary to us, we really never thought of it that way. We had imagined it before, but we never thought it would come so quickly. So it took us by surprise.

What we will create on Natal would be something that has no limitations. Ideas from outside the box. I have a strong feeling that Natal will allow us to create things that we really want to create.

Sega interested in Project Natal voice controls

Sega’s R&D Creative officer, Toshihiro Nagoshi, was also interviewed at TGS 2009 (Tokyo Game Show).

He was interested in both speech recognition and facial expression recognition, or perhaps tone of voice recognition. So I hope that means we’re going to have a lot of Sega games we can talk to, or games where we can order people around. Or maybe we will get games that sense when you are frustrated and start swearing at the game, so the game will then make it easier or give you hints.

“Like when gaming changed from 2D to 3D the genres of gaming had also been renewed, if this new system leads to renewing the current format, I think it’s a very positive change.

“But it wouldn’t be interesting if it were just a rereun of what we already have, so I hope that it becomes something new that would move gamers.

“If it’s not the game that tells you what to do, but instead if it’s your emotions that decide how the game proceeds, I think that may be the ultimate form.

“The most innovative side to it is that its controller free, and that it focuses on voice recognition. When you play games, you’re basically saying something, whether it be pleasant or disturbing. Voices do not affect game play today [Carl: in some games they do], but I think it may be the last input source left. With or without the controller, you’re still using your hands. So I guess it’s our voice that we’ve never really used before, and I see a lot of potential in that field.”