LOS ANGELES — As near as we can tell, Microsoft’s Xbox 360 camera controller Project Natal works as advertised.
The controller, introduced Monday at the company’s E3 press conference, uses two cameras and a microphone to let you interact with the Xbox 360 just by waving your hands in the air, speaking and moving your body. The demonstration of the device at the press briefing made it look quite impressive, but playing is believing. We were invited to try Natal for ourselves following the briefing, and what we saw seemed to work very well.
The first game that Wired magazine senior editor Chris Baker and I got to play was the handball-style game first shown in the demo. The avatar on the screen reacted to the major movements of my body, walking around in 3-D space as I moved around the floor. I needed a good deal of floor space to play the game — we were in a hotel room that had been totally cleared of furniture, so I had plenty of space to move my arms and legs around, trying to bounce a volley of virtual red balls back at the screen.
I immediately got into it, starting to work up a sweat as I lunged around the room, trying to block the orbs with my hands and feet and send them flying back into the screen. The connection between my body movements and the on-screen avatar’s felt seamless — it was quite a lot of fun. At one point, I thought the camera was screwing up because I wasn’t hitting the balls, but as it turns out, virtual me was too far away from the virtual ball, and I had to step forward. The Project Natal camera seems to measure depth — the distance between you and the screen — quite well.
Later, Microsoft producer Kudo Tsunoda, who’d demoed this game to us, showed us what was going on “behind the scenes.” He brought up an image that showed what Natal’s two cameras could see. The standard RGB camera in the unit, he says, was watching the positions of our skeletons. Sure enough, crisp, solid stick figures appeared on screen, representing me and Baker. As we moved, the stick figures on screen matched our movements. Natal’s camera didn’t pick up our individual finger movements, but it could tell when we bent our wrists, picked up our legs, tilted our heads, etc., not to mention tracking us as we moved around the room.
Meanwhile, an infrared camera was tracking our distance away from the television. As we moved forward, our outlines turned red; as we moved back, they shimmered blue. By combining both of these sets of data, Natal knows exactly where you are and what you’re doing. It knew when I stepped behind Baker, or if he walked in back of me, and it still tracked, separately, the parts of both of us that it could see.
We got another glimpse at how this worked while playing a version of the driving game Burnout. The controls are simple — slide your foot forward to accelerate, back to reverse, and turn your hands like you are holding a virtual steering wheel to drive. It takes a little getting used to, but it works — and, again, if someone was standing behind you waving their hands around, the camera would still be able to track the specific skeletal movements the camera is looking for.
Finally, we entered the last room — an audience with Lionhead Studios’ Peter Molyneux and his new game, Milo and Kate. Unlike the technical demos that we’d played already, Molyneux stressed, Milo and Kate is a retail product, the next big game from Lionhead. It’s similar to virtual pet games like Nintendogs, but with a realistic-looking person instead — a young boy named Milo. (Not appearing in the demo was his dog Kate.)
Natal is used to make your interactions with Milo seamless and natural. By standing in front of him as he plays on the swing set, you can move the “camera” just by walking around the room — your viewing angle will change in accordance with your natural movements. When Milo throws you a pair of goggles to go fishing with, you put them on by raising your hands to your head and making “glasses” around your eyes with your hands. When you fish, you can splash around in the water and grab at the fish — it all comes very natural.
Unfortunately, the Milo and Kate demo was quite brief — if you watched Microsoft’s press conference stream, you saw most of what we did. When Game Informer magazine editor Andy McNamara stood in front of Milo and said his name, Milo responded: “Hi Andy. I see you’re wearing green today.” (Does Milo have a built-in database of every possible name, or did they just preprogram him with the names of the E3 judging panel?)
I can see the massive potential of this game, especially considering how charming and lifelike a character Milo is. But like everything else about Project Natal, the real test of Milo and Kate will be when it’s in our living rooms, away from the controlled demos of E3. What will it be like when Peter Molyneux isn’t walking you through the process? How will Natal work in real-world situations, like my very sunny apartment? And what other actual games will use this tech?
For now, what I can say is that the hands-on demos worked great, and Molyneux’s project could be a killer app. But who knows how the final product will be received.
