Graphics Horse said:
But that could be done with Move, right? You'd have to hold two glowing controllers of course, but it knows exactly what your hands are doing and where they are.
Sure, you can track where the Move wands are...and those act as your hands, but unless you're going to require the well-lit conditions for your playing environment that a normal RGB cam, like PS Eye, requires in order to see the player, the Move ball points are only going to provide a rough point of reference to guess where your arms, shoulders, and neck and head are. Natal has no such weak point in this way since it can work in the dark or very bright and/or unevenly-lit rooms thanks to the depth pickup inherent to its design. So, Move could have more accurate sub-pixel positioning of the wands to represent your hands, but has to require the buttons and triggers to act in the normal video game fashion and has limited to no sight beyond that unless you want to require well-setup lighting that I can find impossible to believe most people already have in their gaming environment. The detected positions in the space in front of the camera for the wands' balls and their feedback of angle is the only real data to rely on in all lighting situations...and it will have limited accuracy for everything that's estimated from that data.
Natal can pick up your entire body because it's tracking yourself to match a skeleton to map an on-screen avatar/game character to or just virtual hands and such while doing things like pinning your position in front of the camera a point in the game environment. That means that any number of simultaneously-tracked stances, movements, and special gestures can be acted upon and considered for input for your game character at the same time with more natural movement and control because you aren't limited to buttons and sticks.
Movement through environments without a controller could be achieved by tracking your position relative to a 'home' point and allowing walking/running speeds in a range of directions chosen by design when detected as being stopped with both feet in the 'away' position from the 'home' spot. As a rough idea that is just for illustrative purposes:
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Something like this region grouping and their relationship to the player's home position could be visualized at the feet of your game character to help understand where your feet are without having to actually try to look at them and away from the screen. Or it could be a squared-off gridwork, like a DDR layout for dancing or whatever you wanted. It's arbitrary in its shape and layout. Voice command activation could be an option, too. Face tracking could be used for turning a camera, as well.
In any case, you could be tracked with Natal doing multiple things at once with just your body and still communicate specific spatial relationship to the game world at the same time, like walking along a virtual path on-screen that corresponds to the space in front of the camera...sort of like augmented reality without the need for the looking-at-myself-in-the-mirror effect as your avatar/game character would face into the screen, too, if that's how it was designed.
Move is limited primarily by its weakness of standard camera pickup which needs adequate lighting to see you and has no consistent way to track space and distance without the wands and those only represent two points, one for each controller if you are using them. It could guesstimate distance to the camera by comparing relative size versus a capture reference point before the session begins. Natal has much better vision in both hardware and software because of its focus on nothing but the player without the aid of devices or props...which it could still use if desired. It's easy to forget that there's nothing wrong with the possibility of Natal plus controller, too.
gofreak said:
He asked about possibilities beyond Move, yet you've pretty much perfectly described the pitch Move was given last E3
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In terms of 'hand' interaction with virtual objects, I'd wager for now that a controller or sensor in the hand with a camera will be easily a better solution than a camera on its own, for a variety of reasons.
Oh, I know the basic gist of what I described could be achieved with Move, just as it could be done in a rougher fashion with Wii. But, like I say above, it's the ability to track lots of simultaneous body movement at the very same time that allows for more natural acting out for Natal versus Move. I imagine a cool bullet time-like moment in a game could also be fun to have to move your body to dodge many incoming shots...or human Tetris, or more involved gestures that require the entire body...or whatever. It's clearly a mistake to limit the consideration for input from Natal to just your hands.
There's a big difference in the kind of body tracking Natal is doing compared to what we've seen done with eye or eyetoy. You get a generality that wasn't there before. But on Move+Eye you certainly can achieve what would be perceived by most to be a similar result, certainly for the upper body. You'd be trading off a generally good quality of track (that you get on Natal, that gives you things like your elbows etc.) for a track that's less generally good, but that will in all probability actually be more precise and reliable at the hands where a Move controller is present. And typically we give our hands a lot of responsibility in terms of our actions...
Oh, I know a pair of Move wands would be more position-accurate than just tracking hands with Natal, but Move is still limited in it's overall vision thanks to it being a standard video cam with a severe weakness to variable lighting conditions. There's nothing stopping prop-use with Natal, but even without it, the accuracy of position should be more than good enough for most gameplay scenarios, IMO. What if I want to elbow someone? Shoulder charge them? Grab them with my arms? Use a palm strike as opposed to a close-fisted jab or even alternate between the two? What if that palm could be tracked to trap and capture an incoming strike as opposed a closed fist that is detected as a purely offensive move? Then there are my legs and ability to dodge an incoming attack with more realistic flexibility that accounting for my whole body's movement with full skeletal tracking would. What if I want to hop over a sweep kick? Or how about the crane kick from Karate Kid? :lol Joking...
I mean for something like Ricochet, you could definitely do that on Move, albeit with more compromised leg interaction, but probably better hand interaction. The same goes even more so for the described Rapid Rush control scheme (which honestly sounds like a reskin of Antigrav's controls...as does that rumoured Sonic Riders game).
Sure, man. But again, it's a bit too simple to simply lop off the level of body tracking and estimation Natal brings to the table in order to make Move look better in the comparison.
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I mean, you just made the poor on-screen character lose the ability to use his legs and body to hit and block with. Obviously, Ricochet wouldn't be the same game without the ability to dance and contort your whole body to play the game with.