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Originally Posted by zengonzo
Considered another good application of controller + tracking:
TIE Fighter 2
The 360 Controller becomes an actual flight yoke, and the head tracking lets you look around your cockpit.
Hand gestures could activate other cockpit effects .. Raise your arm to toggle HUD options, or the like ..
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Head-tracking doesn't really work great when you have one screen locked in one position. You either need a wrap-around display of some type (even Forza's three-screen setup as a start) or a goggle/visor display. Because if you turn your head 45 degrees to the left, you're now straining your eyes 45 degrees to the right to look at the TV that is right where it always was.
As a result, if you're only going to have one display sitting across the living room from you, you have a very narrow range of head turning motion to track and a very unnatural "I'm turning my head but always looking in the same direction" motion that destroys the immersion.
Now, tracking head movement laterally instead of turning - letting you literally lean your head over to lean around a wall in and FPS or literally pop up and down to pop up out of cover in a Gears-like game - that could work pretty well.
I'm told Natal is something MS Research has been working on for years. Or rather, it's born from that stuff. It's apparently not the 3DV Systems tech, but it's similar enough that MS bought the company to wrap up all the legal implications (probably came across some of the same stuff that was patented). And MS has been spending a ridiculous amount of money on voice recognition in the research department for MANY years. Bill Gates was a firm believer that in "the future", the ability for our computers to hear and see us and understand what all that meant was going to be huge - the defacto way we interact with computers.
I'm still not sold until I see how accurate it is in a real living room situation, not a brightly lit, sparsely populated demo environment. But it's technologically super neato.
The PS3 motion controller is nothing special. It's the Wiimote with motion plus, and the same eyetoy they have now. No "special processing" other than the cam and wiimote stuff you see all the time now. The camera just sees color, and has terrible low-light problems (anyone who has used the PS Eye can attest) because it's just a normal webcam with mic. The Natal camera is supposedly special (I'd like to learn more), but the real magic is the custom array mic, the way it fires IR beams around your room and has a second IR camera to pick 'em up and therefore add Z or Distance data to the video stream, accurate to within one centimeter.
The possibilities there are huge. They could certainly do object recognition - a game could not only model and mimic you, but could know when you pick up a cup or soda can. At a most basic level, in social networking environments you could have an avatar truly do what you're doing including munching on chips exactly as you do or taking a sip of beer or whatever. At a more advanced level, you could build object recognition into games - literally take a sip of water or whatever you have around (or mime it with an empty cup) to drink a health potion. With that kind of notion as a starting point, imagine what they could do with recognizing other objects. Imagine the real-world and marketing implications of recognizing
specific products. Get a bigger energy boost from drinking a Mountain Dew!
Doing quality body tracking and object recognition is pretty tough with a basic camera (PS Eye, Xbox Vision, etc), and the usefulness of object recognition kinda goes out the window when you're expected to hold a wand controller of some point as well.
So, yeah...Natal is potentially in a whole other league. With that huge caveat - "provided it works." And is priced right. And has a gotta-have-it pack in game.
Now, the recurring theme in this thread is "but how is picking up a cup or something and drinking it an easier or better or more accurate way of drinking a potion than pressing X?"
It's not. Definitely, totally not. If you're comfortable picking up a controller and pressing X, you're still going to want to do that. And games that are made for you will still be made for that. These sorts of technologies shine when games are made that specifically do what they do - there are a few obvious crossover titles (golf is a big one) but mostly, you want to make games directly for motion tracking.
But I'll bring up the example of my mother, again. She has no interest in games. Won't pick up a real game controller and move sticks and stuff. It does not matter that Wii Sports Bowling would be more precise and accurate and faster with a normal controller input, or that she could do it while sitting in her chair and not have to get up, and so on. She won't do that - it's just a barrier. An irrational, but nonetheless totally real, barrier. But she has her damn sparkle ball in Wii Sports Bowling because she "gets it" when it's done that way.
So when people ask how body tracking could be used to "improve Halo," that's really not the point. Games like that do gangbusters and consoles already have the tools to make those games great. The question is "what types of games can motion tracking enable that traditional controllers can't?"
Nintendo figured that out and sold a gazillion units.