Looking for your Questions for the Developers behind Project Natal

"I've seen conflicting information, can you give a straight answer on whether or not Natal has a Time-of-Flight camera or something else?"

"What possibilities will HCI researchers and enthusiasts have in interfacing Natal to a desktop machine? Will we see official drivers (like we did for the Xbox 360 controller) or will we have to write our own?"

How good is accuracy of the  face/voice recognition?

Will Natal recognize me if I speak English with my German accent?

Will Natal recognize my face reliably? I tried the face-recognition which came with my Dell XPS 16 and I got tiered after 10 minutes trying  to login to Windows.

I was wondering if you will release some SDK like XNA so I can create a program to control the entire room with Natal (lights on, off, etc.)

I have no reason to doubt that the whole facial recognition and motion tracking thing works. However, one of the more implausible things shown in the Natal concept video last E3 was the "use your own gear" feature, in which the kid holds up his skateboard to the camera and it gets scanned and used ingame. How real is this feature and how will it work? How does Natal know what to scan and what not?

When can be do it on PC? I want to play "special" PC games with Natal + 3D glasses. And I want to use Natal as multi-touch on PC.

Purely Xbox360 part, is there a lag? how accurate? how easy to code? how flexible of SDK? If it is using CPU as stated officially, how much performance is sacrificed?

Does the Natal team have plans to tie in Natal with Stereoscopic 3D games? 

That would be awesome.

CKurt said:

Ian2 said:

*snip*

+1

When we saw head tracking I immediatly tought, if they know where your head is they can render the image accordingly and make a 3D effect right ?

Have you seen some of the stuff that Johnny Chung Lee was doing with the Wii Remote? Last I heard, he's on the Natal team.

Possible applications of the natal hardware and software for non gaming usees like:

Disabled persons with limited mobility - enabling them by using the limited range of motion / face to control the home environment.

also use of natal tech to create new computer aided imersive traning systems, examples include police, fire, emt and others.

this could be with the xbox or attached to a network of pc and xbox hardware .... allow the netal hardware to work with a pc.

Latency (time from doing something physically to seeing response on display)? And how much is it limited by the design of the system and how much by processing power?

Follow up question if he wants to discuss it: Will going for lower latency lower the accuracy/usability?

There are so MANY bad 3rd-party games on the Wii... It seems the only people who can make good Wii games is Nintendo. I don't know why. But the question is how would MS ensure that good games are made for Natal?

What opportunities will open up in the future with increased processing power?

I would like, to know if disabled people can use Project Natal, especially if Project natal can be used when a people is sit in a wheelchair...

In All Tv Spot and promoted video people are standing.

Can i use it sit on crunch? Or an wheelchair?

And the games as River wild required that people necessary are in standing?

W3bbo said:

"I've seen conflicting information, can you give a straight answer on whether or not Natal has a Time-of-Flight camera or something else?"

 

"What possibilities will HCI researchers and enthusiasts have in interfacing Natal to a desktop machine? Will we see official drivers (like we did for the Xbox 360 controller) or will we have to write our own?"

It's not time of flight, it projects a grid on the scene in near-infared light.  Some more info here: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2365136,00.asp

CreamFilling512 said:

W3bbo said:

*snip*

It's not time of flight, it projects a grid on the scene in near-infared light.  Some more info here: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2365136,00.asp

That is surprising, because everything I have read up until now stated it was a time-of-flight camera. Here is an example. What changed?

Also, saying "it projects a grid on the scene in near-infrared light" doesn't explain how it works. At all. How does it come up with a depth value for each pixel? I am not saying it doesn't do that, I am just saying a huge amount of other info is left out that doesn't give us any idea of how this actually works.

The link you provided doesn't help much either. It says another sensor "reads and then interprets" the grid. Great, doesn't actually give any explanation of how it works. Reading depth is much more complex than ready light intensity.