MS just announced some pretty awesome stuff for the Xbox | Hacker News Reader

MS just announced some pretty awesome stuff for the Xbox

gizmodo.com

73 pointsviggity35 comments

I hope Natal works out as well in real life as it does in the ads. I really like some of the motion-sensitive Wii games... but Wii games have terrible graphics, and I find that distracting. Having games that are both motion sensitive AND full HD will be wonderful. (I wonder if there will be a Mirror's Edge 2 that takes advantage of this.)

If Natal works, there's tremendous applications in terms of interactivity at work. How about we leverage this stuff for "Minority Report" type interfaces with 50" flat screen TVs? How about rear projection? Imagine collaborative picture or movie editing over the net? Can stuff like this be leveraged for pair programming? How about animated CRC cards which can execute and animate their functionality? Such things have been possible for awhile now, appearing in places like TED. Natal and the dropping price of big TVs can make them easily accessible to small and mid-sized companies.

At first I was really skeptical that the motion stuff was more Hollywood demo than reality. Then I took a closer look at the sensor bar:

http://cache.gizmodo.com/assets/e3xbox/e3xbox300.jpg

I don't think that yellow thing to the left is a camera, but if both those other holes are cameras, then that would mean the XBox could indeed be getting full 3D information on you, and that really does open up some interesting possibilities. I doubt the demos are possible with silhouettes, but with full 3D information... maybe.

I remain skeptical until I try it, but I have to admit I'm intrigued. This really could be a big deal. It's cool not because current games will translate to this; they're all specialized for current controllers. It's cool because this will enable new things, some of which are things that the Wii seemed to hint at but doesn't seem to have been able to execute on.

I assume that the tech inside the camera is same as the 3DV ZCam, who MS purchased a few months ago. One camera captures RGB images, the other captures depth information from infrared pulses. The depth cam isn't very high res (I think 320x240 @ 30fps), but it doesn't really need to be for gesture recognition.

I've worked with the ZCam and its kind of finicky - its very sensitive to how the depth sensor is calibrated. Also, the depth sensing doesn't work well with reflective surfaces that I've seen. I'm curious if/how they've gotten around those issues.

There are indeed two cameras and a microphone array. The hardware design is still not final, but it is able to extract accurate depth information. Similarly, the software is not final, but the skeletal tracking demos which I have seen have been pretty impressive.

In the interest of correctness, I should say they aren't both normal cameras. In the interest of keeping my job, I won't say more. Needless to say: our APIs will provide at least depth, color, and skeletons. Cool stuff :-)

If this is as cool as it looks, it's one hell of a response to the Wii.

That said, I'm a little skeptical, the lack of any sort of tactile feedback, even just holding an object, may be awkward.

Here is a video of the Natal. Wow.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03thQvGRVvQ&feature=playe...

I just hope it works as advertised and I hope it has an easy to use API/SDK.

Yikes. I wonder how Nintendo can respond to this. Microsoft is really going for their throat here.

Just to rub it in Nintendo's face a bit more, during the demonstration at E3, the guy explaining the system said "This isn't a game where you end up on the sofa just kind of using some preset waggle commands."

Ow.

'Tis true though. I've worked briefly with the Wiimote, and it really isn't as capable as advertised - forget tracking any sort of complex gestural movements, it's really only good for jerks and twists - i.e. something that saturates the sensor good.

This thing is going to absolutely destroy the Wii, if it works as advertised...

In the Rayman: Raving Rabbids games, one of the minigames involves tracing an outline on the screen with as much accuracy as possible. I don't know whether or not you'd consider that "complex", but it certainly involves a little more than jerks and twists. (Just the first thing that came to mind :) )

The pointer and the accelerometers are two separate things. I haven't heard many complaints about the pointer accuracy (which is what Rayman uses for the section you're thinking of).

I don't know the technical specifics, so I'll take your word for it ;)

The Wii sensor bar combined with the little camera inside your Wiimote can give you a reasonably accurate estimate of where your wiimote is pointed on the screen.

This is quite bad at gestures though, particularly when the front of the Wiimote is pointed away from the sensor bar (as it is in games like boxing and tennis). In these cases, lacking a visual way to tell movement, the controller relies entirely on the accelerometer, which while theoretically capable, saturate very quickly with full body motion.

This is why in Raving Rabbids, where you have to play rabbid-DDR with the music, you have to jerk the controller - the accelerometer is neither reliable nor accurate enough to reliably infer your intentions through light motions.

Thanks for clarifying (I never can do those music minigames!)

If any of this is true and actually delivers, coupled with technical limitations on the Wii (1), it would seem the story is that they can't. At least not without pumping out a new console.

What will be interesting to see is how Sony responds to this. If the Xbox 360 software wasn't already a million times better than the PS3 software, project Natal seems hellbent on making it so. And Sony, unlike Nintendo, have a platform which to some extent allows expansion and further development.

Definitely interesting times ahead in the console world.

1: http://hackmii.com/2009/02/why-the-wii-will-never-get-any-be...

I don't know how much of a threat this is. I personally don't like the wiimote a lot, so there is definitely room for improvement. But the wiimote comes with every wii, and can be used on every game.

So the problem Microsoft has is that there will not be a large library to take advantage of the Natal. It seems like it'll be another eyetoy. The Natal will probably sell a decent amount, but its use will languish from a lack of compatible games.

And right now the wii is known for family and group games. One good product launch by Microsoft is not going to change that. Also, unless Microsoft lowers prices, or puts a new bundle out, the wii will probably be cheaper.

I can see one significant difference here: the Natal has what seems like a very intelligent camera system, and that can be a standalone product, whereas the Wii system by itself is useless.

A media center that allows one-click videoconferencing with your TV, bundled with a Minority Report style photo album viewer, DVD player, AND has the ability to play games.

If the price isn't anything outrageous I can see fast adoption. Oh, and they have Square Enix lined up. I'd bet it's a worthy contender.

Yeah I don't think it will work quite as well, especially since it says actual features and functions may vary.. reminds me of them hyping the Microsoft surface.

If it did work that would change games and tv apps so much more than the wii could ever do.

I wasn't aware that Surface didn't work, although it would explain the lack of news on it. Natal actually seems similar to Surface; I wonder if the two are at all related.

The voice recognition stuff also looked impressive.

Buzz (Quiz game) with voice recognition is a killer feature. (My mother in law would probably buy one for that)

With the camera and internet play (see the other family) it's going to be bad for that segment of the TV market, because it'll be easy to set up tournaments with cash prizes. Way more people will compete to win $1000 than will watch TV to watch someone else win $100,000.

On an unrelated note, I wonder if/how they're going to prevent it being used for porn. Obviously they won't allow porn games but the video chat + bored teens makes that kind of activity pretty much inevitable.

Obviously they won't allow porn games but the video chat + bored teens makes that kind of activity pretty much inevitable.

There are already porn avatars aplenty. That will make "sexting" visible -- instead of writing and imagining it, you'll just see it. The imagery is probably better with well written text, though. Your imagination is the most vivid rendering system there is.

All that has to happen is for SecondLife to get the interface.

Not only is it voice recognition, but the microphone array determines the direction of the sound and correlates it to a body... so it knows exactly who is talking and where they are talking from. Pretty bad ass.

Can't wait to put my hands on it and start hacking some crazy software. Of course someone will have to write some drivers for it...

I'm guessing that it's USB or Bluetooth, like existing hardware for the system. Windows Vista actually has drivers for the Xbox 360 controllers out of the box. This may end up being surprisingly hackable.

So they announced twitter integration, facebook integration, last.fm stuff.

Call me ridiculous, but have they not considered the possibility of releasing a web browser instead? Then people could have twitter, facebook, last.fm, and whatever else they want. Why is this so hard for microsoft to do?

Having said that, the xBox hardware is so noisy it's not a good machine to use for much apart from gaming.

The lack of a web browser is indeed a glaring hole in the system capabilities, but the optical drive noise is a bit of a red herring these days with the ability to install games to disk. It runs silently when you do that.

That's actually another gripe of mine. What the hell is the point of giving me a HDD to copy games to, if I still have to insert the disc to play it. Complete and utter failure. Also on mine at any rate, the noise from the fans it most of the issue.

Maybe I just have a newer model? The fans run silent for me. If they were noisy that would be aggravating, I agree.

Also, needing to have the disc in place to play HDD games is ridiculous. No question about it.

Is this real or just a "product vision" kind of video based on no concrete technology?

If they have actually solved the hard problems involved in making this technology work, it's extremely cool.

If they have not, it's somewhat akin to a video suggesting that they'll build technology to allow people to fly without any equipment, just by flapping their arms.

They demoed it live on stage. They didn't just play this video for everyone in the audience...

It seems like there is no release date or price info but anyway demo is very cool.

Here is a slightly better link:

http://gizmodo.com/5273957/microsoft-e3-keynote-archive?skyl...

I'm really looking forward to CoD Modern Warfare 2 - the trailer looks ridiculous. I've wanted a new video card for a while, but I'm not going to let myself buy one (or an accompanying 24" monitor) until I get my product launched. Looks like my deadline is November.

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