Project Natal, as most of you no doubt know by now, is the code name Microsoft’s new controller-free gaming and entertainment experience. As stated from the official fact sheet, the hardware of Natal is the world’s first to combine an RGB camera, depth sensor, multiarray microphone, and custom processor running Microsoft’s own proprietary software. This enables Natal to recognize people’s voices, faces, and full body movements, including those of the arms, legs, and torso.
The goal and purpose of this project is to make gaming less difficult for newcomers to enjoy and get into, much like Nintendo’s aims with the Wii, which have been successful, but is Natal set to raise the bar? It certainly looks promising, but there are still plenty of questions for Natal, like how much will it cost and how hard it is to develop for. As we’ve seen with the Wii, developers are able to shovel out dozens and dozens of titles, most of which use the motion sensing in weak, uninteresting ways. I just hope somehow that Natal is just hard enough to develop for that shovelware minded developers don’t give it a bad name.
One other question I had about the project was how far away does the user have to be from the sensor for it to work? Being that it doesn’t operate with IR, like the Wii, it seems as though players won’t have to budget as much room in their living room or apartment to make full use of Natal. This is key as I think I speak for a lot of people in saying that using a Wii and especially a Balance Board in confined spaces can be a real pain. With Natal, and its sensors and camera, it appears from the Milo demo that players can get right up next to their TV, without having to worry about being in a ‘detection dead zone.’
Going after casual and non-gamers might be good for business, but I think most gamers could care less about that. We want to see what Natal can really offer in terms of bringing out a whole new level of interaction and experience. Natal appears to take voice and image recognition far beyond anything else to date, and its motion capture ability may prove to be more accurate than the Wii MotionPlus, although that remains to be seen. The demos of Ricochet and Splat looked fun enough, but they were just a little too chaotic and ‘loose’ to be taken for much more than just a tech demo, although I can’t say I was not impressed by both. That said, the Milo demo was nothing short of astounding. The potential there is almost frightening, and extremely exciting. Of course other gaming peripherals have done similar things like the Eye Toy, the WiiMote, heck even the old Activator from Sega, but clearly no where near to this level of accuracy and integration.
Getting back to that Milo demo, wow… I’m still awestruck at what it could mean for games, especially mystery/adventure games and RPGs. Obviously any genre of game could benefit from what Natal apparently can offer, but I think those genres would benefit from it most readily. Also, I wonder about the possibilities of older games getting patches to work with Natal? It’s highly unlikely, but how cool would it be to play something like Oblivion or Fable with this tech? I’d also love to see Condemned with Natal, but that’s just wishful thinking.
Project Natal has a tremendous potential and I honestly hope Microsoft and developers can pull it off. If they don’t, someone else no doubt will. It will be very interesting to see what Sony and Nintendo have to combat this incredibly exciting news.
