Switch Lights

The lights are on

How Natal Will Watch You And Your Family


At Microsoft's annual Think Next Convention in Tel Aviv, the company's Israel R&D Center presented a demo that displayed how Natal reads human movement and can somehow determine player gender.

The video over at NextGen-News is narrated by Dr. Ilan Spillinger, Microsoft VP of hardware and technology, and shows what looks to be a surprisingly accurate reading of the motions of the woman onstage. Natal overlays a basic skeleton on what looks like an infrared human image. In the upper right, you'll notice that the woman's avatar keeps up with all of her movements, which is the most important deal here since this is what will appear in all of the games. Halfway through, a dude walks into Natal's sights and it instantly creates a second male avatar, though the system seems to chug a little when more than one person is awkwardly dancing around.

Anyone else think that Natal uses the same technology as the Predator visor?

Email the author , or follow on , and .

Comments
  • That's cool to see the background actions in motion.

  • This looks pretty sweet, but I'm guna take a guess here and say that it's not as good as it looks...

  • Yep microsoft bought Predator tech for their new toy. It's kinda sad it can only handle one person at once very well though.

  • I still think it has potential. Kind of disappointing that it seems to stress a little when more than one person is up there, but it might be something still to be worked on. We'll just have to see.

  • low end tech but yeah its about the same sans geographical identity.

  • It's understandable that it can only handle 1 person on screen to work well. The Xbox 360's hardware has been out-of-date and needed improvements for a while now.

  • where am I suppose to put my sensor bar, eyetoy and natal?

  • Impressive video.

  • pretty cool. i think this would come in handy with Paper Toss

    honestly, though. i think sports games would become 10x more interesting with Natal. i just hope it works
  • Until this or Move makes a break away in something completely bad ass I don't care.

  • In the future, there will be robots.

  • By watch....do they also mean "We will watch you through our cameras for our own personal enjoyment?"

  • Where's the finger tracking? Steps in the right direction, but they have a few more hurdles to go before it's half of what they said. Really cool though.

  • LOL.  It does resemble the Predator visor technology.  I have a feeling that Natal is optimally designed for one person.  All of the advertisements show one person using the system, and, since two people slowed the performance, maybe you need multiple Natals.  I hope not.  

  • seems fun, its just too bad half of microsofts xbox 360's have failed there would be a much larger customer base for this.  

  • It still has about 6 months of development which is plenty of time to prep it for more than one person. This video was more of a "tech" demo.

  • Xbox releasing first demo about natal and its doing what the eyetoy could do 5 years ago.  Wow, I can move my avatar, where are the games?

    I think the Move and Natal will flop.  The Move games look ridiculously bad.  Basically eye toy games with better tracking.  Natal, LOL YOU CAN MOVE YOUR AVATAR.

  • when i first read this i thought it was going to be a "big brother" thing. i feel a lot better now. i have this weird feeling that some group is going to say that this is inappropriate because of the infrared. i probably wont buy it but this is a big advancement in tech

  • thats cool

  • It's cool. but like E3's presentation, it's to good to be true. The lag will be it's downfall and hard core gamers (that are the biggest population on 360) won't buy it so they won't look like an idiot

1 2 3 4 Next