I'm wondering if MS might loan me a Natal kit so I can start work on "Jungle Blocks 2: REvenge of the Blue Block". It's got hit written all over it :-)

Im excited too, but I think it will take a long time before anybody can answer your question.

Especially considering the hardware/software likely won't see the light of day until at least next year by my guess unless they make some serious progress on it and get a few games built around it by fall.

What Im wondering about Natal is how you actually make use of its recognition abilities -- does it have a library of built in recognizied things as in "Recognized = Human.LeftLeg.WearingShoes.Red"? Or will the programmers have to go "if(Detected.Mass > 20 && Detected.NonStaticObj == true)" ? Could be really hard to make anything for if its the later! :O

We may want to keep this all in one thread, but anyway:

SiriusSeven:

What Im wondering about Natal is how you actually make use of its recognition abilities -- does it have a library of built in recognizied things as in "Recognized = Human.LeftLeg.WearingShoes.Red"? Or will the programmers have to go "if(Detected.Mass > 20 && Detected.NonStaticObj == true)" ? Could be really hard to make anything for if its the later! :O

I've wondered that too. But from what I can tell the Natal unit has it's own processor and software, which then sends the data to the Xbox (which makes sense, since it probably takes a non-trivial amount of processor time to calculate, which wouldn't leave game devs with much for the actual game). So we would probably get an API similar to what your saying, and possibly the raw data as well. But I'm sure someone with lots of time on their hands could take the raw data and create an API similar to "Recognized = Human.LeftLeg.WearingShoes.Red". ;-)

The video on the xbox site was just silly.

1. In pit lane the father was doing spaz moves to replace the wheels... er silly lol. It wouldn't work.

2. The kid on the skateboard, again silly, that concept wouldn't work. A real life skateboard is useless without gravity and g-forces to make it work. It is the same as sitting on a stationary bicycle, any angle and you just topple over.

I just think the video was lame. Sure it's a cool concept and there will be some amazing practical uses, but some of the choices in the video were not practical.

Craig Martin:

The video on the xbox site was just silly.

I agree, but did you see the stage demo video? A bit better use of the system. I want to see a Star Wars game that uses it or an FPS! :)

Jim Perry:

Craig Martin:

The video on the xbox site was just silly.

I agree, but did you see the stage demo video? A bit better use of the system. I want to see a Star Wars game that uses it or an FPS! :)

We all know that the video was prerendered and the actors just moving along to it. I think it's more to show off what would be possible as the technology matures: "here's what Natal could mean for gaming in the next year or two". Everything on there is definitely possible - maybe not this year or next year, but it's inevitable that those things will become real as technology advances.

In the shorter term, I think the live demo of the 3D breakout game looked pretty smooth, especially considering that it's only in the alpha stage. So when Natal is released we probably won't go from controller to skateboarding on our carpets immediately, it's possible in the future, and Microsoft will certainly give Nintendo a run for their money. I mean, that first live demo with the dude moving his avatar looked waaay smoother than most Wii games I've played, and this thing isn't even finished yet!

And don't forget Milo - if Lionhead can get that done in only ~3 months, imagine what will be hitting store shelves (or Arcade, and hopefully CG) in a year.

Plus, think about it this way: once Microsoft gets Natal perfect, it's a hop skip and a jump to interactive 3D holograms being projected into our living rooms! Holodeck, here we come...


So I think we should stop thinking, "This will never work as good as they say" and instead, "Holy crud - look at what they're doing!!". The glass really is half-full. :-)

[edit]: @Jim: How about a jetfighter? You don't even need to drag out the flightstick - just grip it with your hand in mid air to control your X-Wing, and tighten your finger to blast TIEs to smithereens! The possibilities for this thing are nothing short of endless.

Judging by the physical demonstration, it seems to me that the technology is still too early to say how well it will actually work in practice, and therefore how useful it'll be. It's great as a dream, but personally I'd wait to see whether Natal is even released at all (during the 360's life cycle, at least) before asking for support in XNA.

UberGeekGames:

We all know that the video was prerendered and the actors just moving along to it.

Which video? The visions one was of course; they even said so. It's just a target video. The Milo video could have been largely scripted just relying on voice recognition to trigger the "move to next state". But I'm pretty sure the stage demos weren't scripted. I just don't think that dodgeball thing could have been scripted with her remembering every move to make to get her body to line up with the machine. It's a far more simple explanation to just assume the demo was real. Especially after seeing the contorted avatar demo. :p

UberGeekGames:

And don't forget Milo - if Lionhead can get that done in only ~3 months, imagine what will be hitting store shelves (or Arcade, and hopefully CG) in a year.

I don't think they did that in just three months, but I may have missed that figure. I seem to recall hearing they had been working on it for longer than that, at least the general concept of Milo. They may have integrated Natal in three months, but I'm not sure I could believe they achieved all of that in just three months.

Personally I don't want this technology to be the only input for my games. Some games could work (like the trivia game they showed), but I'd rather see it as a supplement to existing controllers for many games. For some examples, see this GD.net post I made: http://bit.ly/1KeTSU. I think having it sign me in from seeing me is amazing, and using some voice controls would be nice (like for changing music without having to pause the game and use the guide), but I don't want to sit there playing most games with no physical controller. Some, sure, but definitely not all.

Nick Gravelyn:

Which video? The visions one was of course; they even said so.

Not sure. I was watching it live on one of the streams - it was the first one they showed after announcing what Natal is. I don't remember them specifically saying "By the way, this is all fake and is just to raise your expectations ludicrously high". ;-) It had the kid on the skateboard, the game show, and car game, taking place in a family's living room.

Nick Gravelyn:

The Milo video could have been largely scripted just relying on voice recognition to trigger the "move to next state".

Possibly, but not from what Lionhead was making it out to be. In fact, after they annouced that the lead announcer dude said something like "Some of you are probably wondering if the Milo sequence was scripted, or if it was actually real. That's why a few dozen VIPs will go back stage and try Milo, right after the show.". I'd love to see how it actually worked with random people trying it! (ReasonsToGoToE3++;)

Nick Gravelyn:

But I'm pretty sure the stage demos weren't scripted. I just don't think that dodgeball thing could have been scripted with her remembering every move to make to get her body to line up with the machine. It's a far more simple explanation to just assume the demo was real. Especially after seeing the contorted avatar demo. :p

Yup, no doubt about them.

Nick Gravelyn:

I don't think they did that in just three months, but I may have missed that figure. I seem to recall hearing they had been working on it for longer than that, at least the general concept of Milo. They may have integrated Natal in three months, but I'm not sure I could believe they achieved all of that in just three months.

Not sure, but I do know they were throwing around the 3 month figure. I don't think they were specific about "3 months from black .cs file to Milo" or "3 months from keyboard input to Natal".

Nick Gravelyn:

...I think having it sign me in from seeing me is amazing, and using some voice controls would be nice (like for changing music without having to pause the game and use the guide), but I don't want to sit there playing most games with no physical controller. Some, sure, but definitely not all.

*Good morning Dave - erm, Nick* ;-) Yeah, it's great to combat the Wii and allow the creation of some pretty cool games and apps, but for some games it just wouldn't work. I think it will be like the Wii for some games, where controllers are either required or strongly recommended, like Super Smash Bros. Brawl and Fire Emblem (not to mention the Virtual Arcade titles).

Who wants to bet E3 2010 will have Microsoft announcing that your body isn't even required for gaming, and by being in the same room as your Xbox it can read your thoughts and react to them? The technology already exists, now they just need to make it work from afar.

The big thing missing (and missing from the Wii controllers, too) is force feedback. You really can't make a sword fighting game or a karate game when your arm doesn't stop when it hits something... Overcoming that design limitation is probably going to be one of the bigger design challenges of the next 10 years. Maybe I should file some early, diffuse, overly broad patent claims right now, so I can cash out in ten years... Hmm...
How about "when interference is detected, the animation on the screen momentarily doesn't match the user movement; meanwhile, a physics solution is iteratively calculated that will move the on-screen animation to the user pose, and that solution is refined and rendered over time until the on-screen pose again matches the user pose"?
Gosh darn it, I'm supposed to keep these claims secret until I file, ain't I? Too bad, I guess that idea is now in the public domain :-) :-)

jwatte:

The big thing missing (and missing from the Wii controllers, too) is force feedback. You really can't make a sword fighting game or a karate game when your arm doesn't stop when it hits something... Overcoming that design limitation is probably going to be one of the bigger design challenges of the next 10 years.

I've been overcoming this design hurdle since I was born.  I call it, "Going outside and actually doing it".  :)

Only way something like that would work virtually is through a body suit or the Matrix.

Barkers Crest:

Only way something like that would work virtually is through a body suit or the Matrix.

Never say never...

How about a bunch of micro-targeted air jets that could be fired toward the player?

Or perhaps even easier, all we need to do is figure out a unified theory of quantum gravity, then we can use that to locally modulate gravitational forces in whatever way we like, right?  :-)

Barkers Crest:

I've been overcoming this design hurdle since I was born.  I call it, "Going outside and actually doing it".  :)

Tsk, tsk, tsk. And you call yourself a programmer?!?!!?   ;-)

@jwatte: Your air jet idea sounds plausible. The biggest hurdle I can see would be developing a system for generating and storing enough compressed air. It would have to be an extra add-on component that sucks air in from the room, compresses it and holds it until needed. Then it's a simple matter of triangulating the position of the victim-I mean, user using the Natal camera system. It would require a lot of testing to get everything correct, but I don't see why Natal couldn't generate data from the user's past movements to figure out the current velocity of the limb that needs to be pushed back.
Then there would have to be some limit for the APIs so that you don't accidentally use more air then is available - I can just see the grainy YouTube videos on the 6 'o clock news of someone going flying through their big-screen TV because the force went out at the wrong time. And depending on how it compressed the air the user may pass out or worse if it uses chemicals and they inhale too much of it...

Just imagine the warning screens on anything that used it - Wii Fit has about 10 screens you have to click through when you start it that details how you should "properly" use the balance board so you don't accidentally kill yourself.

Imagine the XNA games we could make with something like that...

SiriusSeven:

What Im wondering about Natal is how you actually make use of its recognition abilities -- does it have a library of built in recognizied things as in "Recognized = Human.LeftLeg.WearingShoes.Red"? Or will the programmers have to go "if(Detected.Mass > 20 && Detected.NonStaticObj == true)" ? Could be really hard to make anything for if its the later! :O

Ive started writing (well researching) the neural net code to recognize different patterns of motion from that bone structure we occasionally see overlaid on the actors.  From some examples I written down, I should be able to build a boolean test for crude motions, like foot stomps, and hand waves, and possibly even different hand motions, like open palm, trigger finger, and fist.  In the burnout demo, with the people holding an imaginary steering wheel...  boy I don't know about that.  Anyhow, I hope to generate a library of motions, that you could use as buttons...  If you will.

It looks to me like they use a system like what ipisoft does to make that skeleton, but wildly faster...  From that skeleton you ~should~ be able to compute an image coordinate and take a sample of the pixels you find there, and get an idea of what the color is... using a color pruning tree(is that the right name?)...

I am basing my work on QuickProp, and I know there is at least one faster neural network simulator, NevadaProp.  But this is the fastest my little brain can grok at this time... 

The thing I am wondering is...  Will I be able to hook this device to my computer, so I can generate the sample datasets...

Anyhow, I am doing it for my nerd need to know "how does that work?" at the time.  If I can leverage this into an XNA project later, that would be bonus awsome.

GregA:

The thing I am wondering is...  Will I be able to hook this device to my computer, so I can generate the sample datasets...

I'm going out on a completely uneducated limb and guessing 'no'. Microsoft wants this as a big push for the Xbox 360, so I don't think they'd want people building products around it for PC. I'm going to guess it'll require software only available in the dashboard firmware.

Shawn Hargreaves:

Barkers Crest:

Only way something like that would work virtually is through a body suit or the Matrix.

Never say never...

How about a bunch of micro-targeted air jets that could be fired toward the player?

Or perhaps even easier, all we need to do is figure out a unified theory of quantum gravity, then we can use that to locally modulate gravitational forces in whatever way we like, right?  :-)

You got that right.  Many moons ago I had a CompSci professor tell me a computer will never need more than 512mb of RAM.

All of those ideas blow my mind.  I'll start brain storming on the unified theory of quantum gravity on the commute tonight.  I'll have all kinds of neat arrows drawn in my notebook by time I get home.  It'll be great.

Edit:  On a serious note, the more information I find about Natal the more excited I get about it.  Don't want to mention other companies names, but their product that within the past 2 years felt futuristic, now feels out of date.

From what I've read, I think a reasonable timeframe for Natal release is Holiday 2010.  From that I would speculate that if XNA ever does become integrated with Natal, we could possible see the dev component released Spring 2011.  Anything earlier than that would be gravy.

But, I'm still hitting refresh every hour or so on creators.xna.com waiting for 3.1 to get released so I don't want to get too far ahead of myself.  :)

Barkers Crest:

Shawn Hargreaves:

Barkers Crest:

Only way something like that would work virtually is through a body suit or the Matrix.

Never say never...

How about a bunch of micro-targeted air jets that could be fired toward the player?

Or perhaps even easier, all we need to do is figure out a unified theory of quantum gravity, then we can use that to locally modulate gravitational forces in whatever way we like, right?  :-)

You got that right.  Many moons ago I had a CompSci professor tell me a computer will never need more than 512mb of RAM.

All of those ideas blow my mind.  I'll start brain storming on the unified theory of quantum gravity on the commute tonight.  I'll have all kinds of neat arrows drawn in my notebook by time I get home.  It'll be great.

At PAX last year a company was demoing a vest that could be worn that was full of little rumble packs. They demoed it with a FPS such that when you were shot you could feel where the character was hit.

Nick Gravelyn:

At PAX last year a company was demoing a vest that could be worn that was full of little rumble packs. They demoed it with a FPS such that when you were shot you could feel where the character was hit.

Our friendly massage app developers would get a kick out of that.

Who needs force feedback???   A XNA game called "Chuck Norris" and it watches you do pushups with proper form, and provdes you with a leaderboard of your frieds list of who can do the most pushups in a minutes time.  There, your force feedback is plain old exercise and gravity, and you just made a hit game, combated obesity in gamers, and made the world a better place.

Having people stand up and move to play your game alone will provide a whole new level of imersion, just because they are using the muscles, and not twitching their fingers and thumbs.  Those are the endorphins that the other console has tapped into and why it is so fun to do such simple activities.

Only Natal totally pwns that system...  OMG I got MS stock at $18  This is so awsome!!!

Barkers Crest:

Many moons ago I had a CompSci professor tell me a computer will never need more than 512mb of RAM.

A friend likes to tell a story that when shopping for a new computer, the salesman said "This baby has a whopping 16mb hard drive! You'll never be able to fill it up, ever!". You gotta love the pace of technology advances.

Nick Gravelyn:

At PAX last year a company was demoing a vest that could be worn that was full of little rumble packs. They demoed it with a FPS such that when you were shot you could feel where the character was hit.

I remember that! I think it was advertised in GameInformer magazine - if I can find a link I'll post it here.

The time line sounds reasonable, but I'm hoping it'll be 1 year accelerated. Of course, maybe it's better for Microsoft to force us to pace ourselves when dishing out cool new toys - my head might explode from all the awesomeness if we get Avatars and then Natal right afterwords! And then there's the ZuneHD...

[edit]: @GregA: That's hilarious, and you'd probably be right! How about modifying their Avatar based on how well they rank, and make them fatter and fatter as they fall to the bottom of the scoreboard for added realism?

I just thought of something that might throw a wrench into all of our plans: the average gamer is probably barely fit enough to get up and swap discs in the Xbox. We'll need to very gradually ramp up the physical activities, since we don't want to give all our good customers heart attacks.

Karate Trainer HD Ultimate edition.

Once again...  Using neural nets it watches your motions and grades the quality of your moves.  String well formed karate moves together to get multipliers and make your score explode.  You just made a game that will sell 10x as many copies as other console fit...

UberGeekGames:

I just thought of something that might throw a wrench into all of our plans: the average gamer is probably barely fit enough to get up and swap discs in the Xbox. We'll need to very gradually ramp up the physical activities, since we don't want to give all our good customers heart attacks.

Looks like Nintendo thought about this problem already:

http://www.giantbomb.com/news/nintendos-vitality-peripheral-baffles/1374/

Only way something like that would work virtually is through a body suit or the Matrix.

I said "overcoming the design limitation," not "solving the unified field theory of gravity." Although that would be cool, too :-)
You work around this limitation by designing around it. Kind-of like my design above (which btw can be used on non-motion-controlled games, too, when you want forward kinematically animated characters to have physics act on them).

From walking the floor at E3, I can tell that this is the year of the input peripheral. Shotguns, skateboards, turntables, cowbells... MORE COWBELL!