REMEMBER CITADEL said:
No, I don't think that's what happened here. According to PrimeSense's reference design, there are two chips in the camera - one for collecting raw data and one for making sense of it. It seems the first one is still in Natal, but the second one isn't.
And 10-15% of processing power is not a lot. 30%, which is a rumored figure, is. I guess we'll have to wait until E3 to find out the truth.
Obviously the 2 cameras have chips, like every electronic device has. But the one they removed isn't for capture raw video or depth data.
It was a third one (as I remember it also appeared in this reference design document) used to process the info coming from this 2 sources in order to recognice human bodies, calculate the "bones", movements etc. Since it was expensive and slow causing too much lag.
They removed it, to make Natal cheaper and to reduce consistently the lag problem, because the 360 CPU / memory is way faster than the chip. The bad side is that now the console CPU and memory have a lot of work.
This 30% is true (I heard 33%), and in the memory side it is also a big chunk, but we have to consider it isn't even a first version of a final library. So with time they will tweak it and optimize it to reduce it with future versions. For that also is better to have it as a library in the console, to update it without needing to flash the firmware of the camera and maybe customizing a bit (or implement it yourself in your own way) for each game if needed.
You also have to consider this huge % is when tracking the full body, and maybe from 2 people. Maybe tracking 1 guy uses almost the half.
BTW at least some months ago, when MS had a conference for developers in London, it needed to "see" the floor, to track the entire body to recognize a guy. This is why it needed to have the people in a certain distance. A camera can't see your entire body if you are a meter from it.
It is logical that in the future (I bet before release) they will be capable of tracking people just "seeing" the upper half of the body, because I think the legs aren't needed when sitting in the sofa playing most of the games, and it would reduce the amount of console work needed.