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Comment by musclman | Hacker News Reader

Sure, it looks cool, but it appears to require a lot of slow and inefficient physical movement to accomplish the most basic of tasks. Imagine a bunch of cubical works sitting at their desktops waving their arms around trying to navigate their computer's file system :-)

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Keep in mind that, like most of the things designed at the Media Lab, this was built to look really good in demos. The movements are big and inefficient so they will show up well on stage and on camera.

In the real world the movements might be much more subtle. Certainly no broader than, say, American Sign Language, which is quite analogous to what we are reinventing here.

Sorry, I'm skeptical about that. The movements are big so that they will be captured and correctly interpreted by their pattern recognition system. I think they would not be able to detect very subtle movements like ASL. It is ingenious to claim that it was made artificially big and clumsy for the audience.

I think you mean disingenuous.

Thanks, I did mean that :)

Not so sure that these huge gestures are necessary, depending on the technology - You can play games perfectly fine on the wii with little more than the flick of your wrist.

But there the device itself has accelerometers, whereas here, at least if I uderstood it correctly, the camera has to capture the markers on the hand which is much more noisy.

All technology feels lousy out of its time. He's giving the hackers/entrepreneurs the tech. It's up to us to create some valuable/entertaining/necessary functions out of it.

Here's a video demo of Project Natal in use that looks exhausting.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jm0KKa6wACQ

It looks like being exhausting was the point of the application.

Holy Christ. The game seems designed to make people look like spastic dorks.

Its kind of crazy how well project natal seems to work, especially considering that in the TED talk, gloves were required.

No kidding. There was a comic about this a while back.

http://okcancel.com/comic/3.html

Imagine the repetitive stress injury. My body hurts from just using the wii.

Agreed, every time I see this my arms feel tired.

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