Xbox games without controllers?

[jwinslow]

Gizmodo - Testing Project Natal: We Touched the Intangible - Project Natal

How Natal Works
The test system was an ordinary Xbox 360, connected to small PC and camera that simulates the final Natal rig. There are two cameras—one RGB, for face recognition and display video, and one infrared, for tracking movement and depth. Why infrared? The eye doesn't see infrared light. And when you combine an infrared camera with an infrared emitter (also part of Natal), a room is flooded with a spectrum of invisible light that works in the dark.
Natal also has its own internal processing system handling an unspecified amount of the heavy lifting behind Natal's cleaver image and speech recognition. It breaks the human body into 48 points tracked in real time, and it can sense your whole body in Z space, or depth. In fact, on a heat map that measured depth, my hands appeared hotter than my shoulders—because they were closer.
Natal is so smart, in fact, that, if your room is narrowed by a pair of couches, it can signal to a game to narrow the level. It can see about 15' x 20' of a room, according to project leader Kudo Tsunoda's informal estimation.

Matt: My first taste was talking to the father of Project Natal, Kudo Tsunoda and watching as his simple, small hand gestures were mapped perfectly onto the screen. He started up the ballsmacker demo you might have seen in our liveblog, knocking a swarm of balls into wall with every part of his body. When Kudo gestured to me try it, I jumped right in and immediately started smacking at balls with my hands and feet and knees and arms and head as one ball exploded into many, like a virus, until I was doing sad white ninja jerking and jumping movements. Kudo didn't tell me how to "set it up" or what to do. I just did it. You have to realize, Kudo towers over me. I didn't have to calibrate it to my body size, or stand in a weird way for it to adjust. It just worked. Well, until I broke it at the end—it froze up after a few rounds and had to be rebooted for Mark. Hey, it's an early tech demo, so don't read into it. Until that point, it worked remarkably, incredibly well—better than I expected, honestly. The bright fluorescent lights were turned off and on, and Natal didn't flinch. My real movements translated exactly how I expected them to—the precise position, velocity—90 percent of the time, no matter how ridiculously I moved, and some of the other 10 percent might've just been my own bad timing. But the result is a remarkable sense of control. Immersion.

So I floor it, growing confident as I wave through traffic and slowly build speed. I reach maximum velocity, throw my foot back to break, cut the wheel and toss the car into a spin. Yes. This feels right. Just right.
Holy shit.
But Natal can't work this well. It just CAN'T. I need to break it, teach this Microsoft prototype a little humility. What if I stand on my tip toes and steer eight feet in the air?
The car handles fine.
What if I kneel on the ground and steer?
Yup, it still works, save for a moment when my knee shifted and I tricked the machine—a fair mistake, even by my highly ridiculous dork standards.

Closing Thoughts
Matt: Project Natal is the vision of gaming that's danced through people's heads for decades—gaming without the abstraction of controllers, using your body and natural movements—which came more sharply into focus when Nintendo announced the Wii a few years ago. I haven't been quite this blown away by a tech demo in a long time. It looked neat onstage at Microsoft's keynote. Seeing it, feeling it in person, makes me want to believe that this what the future of gaming looks like—no buttons, no joysticks, no wands. The only thing left to get rid of is the screen, and even that'll happen soon enough.
Mark: 2010...or maybe even 2011...is just too long to wait. I want Natal now.

 

[jwinslow]

Gizmodo - Wii Getting Natal-Style Camera Motion Gaming, But Not From Nintendo - Ubisoft your shape

The Wii will soon get camera-based, Project Natal-like motion sensing—at least for one fitness game—courtesy of Ubisoft. It's just too bad the "Your Shape" promo video had to come out today. In many ways, Ubisoft's new solution is like a Project Natal Lite: it's a game accessory, not a system accessory; it tracks some motion, but not much; it uses your body more for feedback than actual game control. Relieved of context, it looks pretty great, even if it fuels criticism that the Wii is become less of a gaming system, and more of a personal health appliance. Now, though, everyone will look to Nintendo for an answer—any answer—to the awesome motion gaming tech we've seen from Sony and Microsoft in the last few days. This is what they'll see.

 

[BuckeyeTillIDie]

Saw a clip of Natal on Kotaku from Fallon's show:

Kotaku - Ever Wanted To See What Project Natal Looks Like On Jimmy Fallon? - Project Natal


Looks worse than the Wii.