Project Natal: Real-Time Motion Capture for the Masses
There is some actual hot news coming out of the E3 conference today – a little something Microsoft has cooked up on the Xbox 360 platform called “Project Natal.”
The technology is being likened to both Minority Report as well as the “beginnings of SkyNet or The Matrix.” What is it?
It, essentially, is the continuation and evolution of technology I uncovered when I was at Mashable that allows gamers and computer users to interface with their machines without the aide of traditional input devices like keyboards, mice or controllers.
PrimeSense, as well as a few other less known companies, have been working at and achieving great success using cameras and other transparent input devices to motion capture what the user is doing, and translate that to useful inputs.
Project Natal tries to go a step further by also introducing limited voice recognition to augment game experience.
It’s heartwarming to see projects like this come to fruition after reporting on their laboratory and funding advancements over the years. The real question is whether it’ll work as advertised. This isn’t the first time that MoCap games have been introduced to the gaming public. Sean P. Aune mentioned to me earlier today that this sort of thing has already been in circulation out in Japan.
“I played something like it in Japan back in ’04,” Sean told me. “It was a shooting game where you were a cop. Many Japanese laughed at the huge gaijain jumping all over the place and diving behind the imaginary blockades. Aside from that, the technology worked pretty well, actually.”
Of course, there are those that aren’t fans of Microsoft. I saw one tweet that said something along the lines of “if it were from any other company aside from Microsoft, I’d believe that it’d come out well formed and non-buggy.” I tend to be more positive. This tech has been developed at a number of companies concurrently, and is tested to the point where when I’ve spoken to VCs investing in it, they’ve bubbled over in excitement.
This will end up being a big win for Microsoft, I predict, and part of what is turning out to be a decent week in the press for the software giant.
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– mrh]
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