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Peripheral Vision Article
Article by Rob Fahey
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By contrast, Microsoft's Project Natal is unquestionably cutting edge. Incorporating a camera with a bespoke sensor designed to map the 3D position of people and objects in the room, it's undeniably impressive. Its applications will differ from those of the Sony peripheral - Natal doesn't seem suited to tracking small, precise movements, but its ability to follow the motions of an entire body are unrivalled. In fact, Natal seems likely to live up to the initial description of Wii games - "jumping around your living room" - to an extent greater than any Wii or PS3 game will.
Natal certainly feels more futuristic than Sony's technology. It's got a brand new 3D sensor, and its software needs to calculate what all the complex human bodies in front of it are doing from that sensor. At E3, Natal has been demonstrated in clear, uncluttered areas - in homes, it will have to contend with multiple bodies, furniture, pets and so on. The computational heavy lifting required is significant, especially compared to Sony's task - plotting the precise position of a couple of conveniently glowing orbs. The fact that it works even to the extent that it already does is a testament to the skill of the engineers involved, and it will be fascinating to watch the technology evolve in the coming months and years.
Based on the simple fact of their relative complexity, it's probably fair to say that Sony's system could - in theory - be on the market sooner and at a lower price point than Natal. It's also likely to suffer less early teething problems, which seem inevitable when Natal is confronted with the vast variety of complexity in normal consumers' living rooms.
However, this may be entirely an academic consideration. E3's demos of Sony's motion controller and Natal were only product announcements in the most broad of senses. These systems are far over the horizon - their announcements designed to placate industry-watchers and shareholders, to prove that these giants aren't about to let Nintendo run away with all of the family silver. In the short term, they amount to little more than FUD - something for fanboys to argue over, and perhaps to disrupt a little of the Wii's retail dominance, but not an important factor in console sales up to this Christmas and beyond.
Nintendo itself would retort that Wii MotionPlus offers solid performance compared to either system, and will be on the market next week - a point which holds a lot of water. However, it's not MotionPlus which should really worry Microsoft and Sony. It's Wii Sports Resort, and whatever else the firm may have in development for MotionPlus at the moment.
If Microsoft or Sony believes that Nintendo has sold 50 million Wiis off the back of motion controls, they are only partially right. The reality is that those consoles have been sold off the back of Wii Sports and Wii Fit - not to mention Mario Galaxy and Mario Kart for the more traditional audience. MotionPlus will sell not because of its technical capabilities, but because it'll be shoved in a box with Wii Sports Resort - which in turn will probably sell many more Wii consoles, especially in under-exploited territories like Europe.
Sony and Microsoft's motion control efforts are only one part of the puzzle. Each one is pointless without a killer application. People don't buy peripherals for their own sake - they buy games, and pick up the peripherals to play them. Nobody would buy a guitar controller if Guitar Hero didn't appeal to them, or drums if they didn't have a burning desire to play Rock Band. The criticism of Wii Vitality Monitor focuses on the fact that Nintendo didn't show any appealing way for it to work with software - criticism which could just as easily shift focus to Sony's motion controller or Project Natal if compelling software isn't forthcoming. Peripherals may be the story of E3, but without games, they're all just unappealing plastic.
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Comments: 1-33 of 33 in total
Poster
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Does anyone actually feel we are reaching saturation point on new peripherals? With RB & GH instruments, balance board and cameras, I physically cannot realistically accomodate things like a plastic skateboard or turntable. I also resent splashing out £70 plus on a single game repeatedly. Once off for a crowd pleaser like RB is fine but for games I am likely to play by myself seems extravagant.
Input devices like Natal will always seem like a gimmick to me and therefore ultimately a wasteful purchase. With the Wiimote it is different, it is the primary controller for that platform, sometimes annoyingly so. The bubble may soon burst on this recycled trend for unique peripherals. My wallet and living space welcome that time.
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most recently on 06/06/09 @ 11:27
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MightyMouse
06/06/09 @ 11:00
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I'm not sure exactly what the author believes by the end of this article. Personally I just disagreed with the idea stated early on that peripherals, not games, were the main 'battleground' between MS and Sony at this E3.
As the author says on the second page, it's the games that sell these things to gamers, so for us the main battleground would be the games. Looking at time spent unveiling the motion controls versus games at the conferences, games are still far more important. The only place I can really see where the accessories beat the games is in amount of fanboy discussion generated. |
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I dont need a hands on with a square wheel to know that its applications are limited!
The constant with all "alternative" input mechanisms is the human body it interfaces with, and the basic requirement that any input needs to be at the users volition, not caused by an inadvertent twitch of the head or hand. I'm happy to debate my skeptical position regarding Natal with anyone, because my reasoning is, I believe, sound and not clouded in any way by fanboyishness or fealty to any particular hardware vendor. |
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Well, to put it simply, Xbox 360 will do a better football sim, kicking and saving goals with natal.
Sony, better Star wars game, imagine red or blue ligh saber. No way to use your feet or body though, but you have a trigger in your hand. Fully body control silouette 1:1 vs hand held controller 1:1 both with HD graphics. Would like both, pros and cons for both as to how they apply to games. Both are telling me to sell my wii. The market leader will depend on price, the sony one is an eyetoy with a controller with a light bulb on the end, so you cna guess its eye toy price + controller sub £ 100. No idea for Natal.
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most recently on 06/06/09 @ 12:41
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Godhather08
06/06/09 @ 11:51
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The X360 is nowhere near having enough horsepower to be able to use the tech in Natal in advanced games. On the X360 we'll only see simple stuff with reduced gfx. Mark my words, you heard it here first. The next XBOX, well that's when it will come into good use.
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Geminosity
06/06/09 @ 17:25
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Godhather, I'll mark your words if Microsoft suddenly takes the unexpected action of removing the Dedicated Processor in the Natal that prevents the 360 from having to do any of these calculations. Somehow I don't see that happening.
I wish people would do some research before they form opinions :/ As the article states though, most of these arguements are fairly silly anyhoo because we've not used either. Once we have them in our hands (or not, in the case of the Natal), THEN it'll be time for some real discussion and analysis :3 In the meantime we can only worry or dream of what these things will bring our gaming future :D |
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What have those buffoons at Nintendo started? Why do we need stupid motion sensor controllers? The development costs of HD software are high enough without the additional cost of programming the games to work with motion sensors. The permutations of tracking movements via a motion sensor controller in 1080p would be horrendous.
This generation of gaming has been mediocre at best and I’d hate to see things deteriorate through Sony and Microsoft trying to emulate Nintendo’s gimmick controller. |
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notmyrealname
06/06/09 @ 18:12
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insert retarded and completely premature and baseless fanboy rant here:
''Project Natal / Ps3 mocap is WAY SUPERIOR THEN Ps3 mocap / Project Natal. I love fanbois:D |
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Well this is strange...claiming that neither peripheral will work without a killer app, which Nintendo has.
Is it really going to be so difficult for Sony to come up with a game with the calibre of Wii Sports? And for third parties to put support for the peripheral into the kind of games we're not seeing them create on the Wii? Think of all the really good games we've had for both HD consoles, and think how they could work with these motion controllers. Think how often we see 7 out of 10 or better games for these consoles. For every great game we've had for the Wii there have been three or four for HD consoles of the same ilk, and many games that have no equivalent on the Wii. Just without motion control. All they need to do is integrate support for the new controllers into the new games that come out and within a couple of months there'd be enough software available to sway me. So says a man with ONLY a Wii. Of course, if it takes a couple of years before we see the peripherals, Nintendo will have a massive head start! |
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From an engineering point of view it's obvious that Microsoft has gone waaaaay behond everyone expected. Peter Molyneux on one interview was very clear: It is not only using the Natal hardware, their Milo demo is using tech of many Microsoft R&D teams: Voice recognition, pattern recognition, handwritting recognition... most of them from Windows 7. Microsoft just gave PM software worth millions for his demo. That IS a big bet. Who knows, maybe Microsoft believes this could be the the user interface for their next-gen Windows-Minority-Report.
Sony took the easy way. Cheap, simple and could be released pretty soon. It is not revolutionary, but it doesn't need to (Nintendo's tech is utter crap after all). I guess Sony will be able to make good money from their wand in the short term, Microsoft won't. But maybe Microsoft has assured the success of XBox720 and Windows 8... it's a huge bet. It's just a theory :-) |
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YourMessageHere
07/06/09 @ 06:50
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I'm somewhat curious to see if Natal is eventually going to end up PC compatible or have a PC version. It strikes me as a bit odd that peripheral companies like Logitech or Saitek or even MS's peripheral wing aren't running to make a PC version of any of these. Of course you can shove a bluetooth dongle in your PC, sit a sensor bar on top of the monitor, get some free third party driver software and have your wiimote work on PC, but an official commercial PC native product that competes is still mysteriously missing. I'd buy it in seconds.
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It IS all about the software. Natal has huge potential, a friend and I had a complete geekout about doing a fantasy RPG with the Natal tech displayed at E3 (http://www.colonyofgamers.com/cogforums/... if you're interested in reading what we came up with.)
However I'm still hugely sceptical when it comes to developers actually making use of that tech. The potential is there to provide a gaming experience completely unlike anything we've seen before. I just doubt anyone will use it for anything other than the equivalent of Wii games. |
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dirk_aircool
07/06/09 @ 11:04
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I don't want to leap about at 2am when everyone else in the house is trying to sleep . I cant see a reason for going down this path with game controll until we have real Virtual Reality display's and we can appear to walk into the games and pick stuff up . Its just a load of corporate ' me to ' ing .
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If Natal can track yourbody movements, they only thing a headset would need to do would be to display the image. It wouldn't even need motion sensors like existing VR headsets have.
That's what struck me once I'd got over my extreme scepticism; if Natal works as advertised, it solves most of the VR stumbling blocks. I'm not expecting amazing virtual world games to come out in the next couple of years, but it seems like the potential for them to be developed in the next 5-10 years is there. |
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From the article: "However, it's not MotionPlus which should really worry Microsoft and Sony. It's Wii Sports Resort, and whatever else the firm may have in development for MotionPlus at the moment."
Spot on. Nintendo is making the others play catch-up, which is not a situation Sony and MS should be finding themselves in. "Is it really going to be so difficult for Sony to come up with a game with the calibre of Wii Sports?" Well, they sure haven't done it so far, sales wise. The fact that they didn't show anything at E3 seems to imply that it's not been easy. |
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spidermanalf
07/06/09 @ 16:22
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In 40 years time when my Grandchild is queuing up to play Red Dwarf, I will tell them of simpler times when you could sit on your arse and not move for hours and have just as much fun.
And they will tell me I am old and hide my false teeth. I like sitting down playing games, I do not want to jump around, I do not want to draw on bits of paper to show some little shit on screen, I don't want to wave my arms about like an epileptic on fire, I want to sit down, with a brew and blow some shit up. |
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Hopefully we'll get another article like this sometime in the future with some more actual research behind it, or with a bit more focus. I've been collecting information about stuff like what's out there in terms of SDK, how does the technology work and how do developers interface with them, how long have the devices been in development, have third parties had their hands on them, etc. A lot of information is out there already - some of that even here on Eurogamer. ;) Right now this article is so sweeping and without details, it's a pity.
To give a simple example: what for instance if WiiMotionPlus and PMC shared virtually the same SDK for developers? Would that matter to companies like EA, for instance? Check out a company called AiLive ... Just saying, but it's definitely going to have an impact on how low the threshold is going to be for developers to play around with this. ;) I also find it amazing that despite the patents having leaked so many months ago, people gloss over the sonic aspect of the PMC - from the patent you can see that where the PMC gets its accuracy from is using (ultra)sound emitters and receptors rather than visual cues to get its accuracy. The visual cues are probably just error correction and some calibration, though I wouldn't be surprised either if their just a fancy way of indicating the controller for player one, player two etc. Maybe they even throw in some ambi-light features for playing in the dark - the advantage of sound after all is that you don't have to care about light too much. Also, I loved the interview on Eurogamer where Microsoft detailed the parameters for Natal. It basically rounds out for me how the technology works in principle. The camera can scan its full field of view in 5 frames, generating a point cloud similar to how for instance environments can be digitally scanned by laser these days. It uses this to find the body. Then it focusses on the body and generates a new point cloud which instead of wasting a lot of time and points on the whole field of view, now shows mostly the body. This information is mapped to a predefined skeletal framework that has 48 joints, to determine the body posture of the player in 3d. From here on, it will keep focussing on the body solely and compare each new 'frame' / point-cloud with the previous position, to determine several parameters for the joints, like position, speed and direction of movement, and also how accurate the software in the camera doing the analys thinks this information is ('confidence' per Eurogamer's own interview). It gives back this information at 30 frames per second apparently (also per the Eurogamer interview). Maybe the biggest implication for now though is what this is going to mean for the console lifecycle. Right now it seems very likely that rather than bringing out the new model, we're going to see Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo expand their lifecycles through the new motion controllers (Natal, PMC and WiiMotionPlus). The market (i.e. the developers) cannot handle a completely new console with even better graphics etc. at the moment - content creation tools will have to mature significantly to increase output and make that cheaper, for instance. I think considering the dedication needed from both platform holders and publishers, and considering the already proven success of motion controls in general for expanding the market, but also improving the gameplay (I think we'll have to look to Sony and to a lesser extent Microsoft to see whether that holds for more 'hardcore' games also), we can treat the big (partly re)launch of motion control as the launch of almost a new generation of consoles by itself. It starts now, with WiiMotionPlus coming to market, and then I'm guessing Sony will follow Spring 2010 with Microsoft probably Fall 2010.
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most recently on 08/06/09 @ 10:55
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peak_performance
08/06/09 @ 10:18
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Natal will be a great TrackIR, at least, which is fantastic.
@BigJonno: I can't imagine why you'd like to play a complete fantasy game controlling it like that. That's stuff that I (and others) thought about when the Wii was launched, only to dismiss a few weeks later because it would suck beyond it's gimmick value. Use motions as supporting controls, not basic. |
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designerheadache
08/06/09 @ 12:19
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Having not used either of the new motion control devices, i can't say with absolute conviction, but it just strikes me that:
- to play games you will feel more in touch by holding a device (wii, PSdildo) rather than waving your hands in the air(Natal). For me thats the current problem with the PS EYE, when you play the games you dont quite feel as if you are truly interacting with them, so based on my limited experience playing these "types" of games Natal holds less appeal currently, although i will happily give it a go when its out and see how it pans out. - Natal looks really interesting from a UI perspective for common appliances rather than a gaming system, although it certainly has possibilities in the gaming area. I really like the idea of walking to a public service kiosk (ala Minority Report) and having it recognise me and be able to easily page through a catalogue of "things" to purchase, or to video chat with a friend and use gestures to interact with them (like in the rather girly MS demo of them sharing dress ideas). Both the new offerings interest me but in different ways, it should be interesting to see how it all works. Still prefer a controller overall though IMO!!! |
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"Is it really going to be so difficult for Sony to come up with a game with the calibre of Wii Sports?"
Well, they sure haven't done it so far, sales wise. The fact that they didn't show anything at E3 seems to imply that it's not been easy. I suspect that just means it's a hardware problem after all. Or rather a marketing problem, Wii Sports does nothing that couldn't be done on the 360 or PS3, but a huge proportion of the people who bought a Wii would be frightened to touch a 360 pad. |
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@Shinji - that's totally fair. I guess that what I was getting at is that it is easier to asses the creative implications without knowing a little bit more about the tech, and it is definitely also a little bit relevant for the commercial side of things. Especially that bit where AiLive has provided an SDK for PMC that provides all the basic functions you need, including easy recording of gestures to be linked to developer defined functions, etc. Not only does this make PMC easy to implement, but as AiLive also did this for WiiMotionPlus, the ease for developers to reuse WiiMotionPlus code for PMC code and vice versa is definitely going to have an implication on the commercial side of things, just as being able to share HD assets between 360 and PS3 now makes the two platforms combined, despite higher art budget requirements, still an attractive investment proposition to developers versus the Wii, where there is also strong competition from Nintendo titles, a fairly high licence fee % wise, etc.
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I don't know what to say about it. Even with Natal i think Microsoft would have its age old image problem with xbox and the casuals may not go for it. And Sony seems to have lost a bit of their mainstream attraction also.
The success of wii would be hard to replicate, Nintendo had the timing right and everything, the marketing was spot on, and nobody else was doing it at the time. To replicate this sucecss you may need a time machine. Or to do something totally different, that appears new and sets you on a different road to your competitors, just like Nintendo did in 2005. I'm sure they will all make a lot of money either way. |
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The secret of Natal if you watch the video slow enough
http://img190.imageshack.us/i/screencapt... mmmmm |
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I wont even bother to read the comments. This article was great and simply thorough on what it was about and not pointless. I can only imagine the fact there will not be many comments as Sony faboys dont have anything to brag about since they are getting somethign thrown in their face in this article, such as the fact its Sony thats reaping off tech and trying to steal from nintendo's territory orifits from their Wiimotion and the fact they keep calling MS whatever they call, when if it wasnt for MS they wouldnt even be able to get online right now cause they wouldt be able to afford a MAC nor OS would have moved this far and this much. And the fact that Natal is being proved to have NOTHIGN to do with a damn wand which i dont get how the fuck can some comfuse such complex and advanced piece of tech as Natal with a freaking wand. You freaking fairies..
For all I care if Natal was from Nintendo or Sony and came out as a NON PS3 nor an XBOX 360 peripheral but a standalone device, id go buy it for the fuck of it. Its just too darn good and futurewise promising. Cant be THAT hard to see it, is it? |
Comments: 1-33 of 33 in total
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