Interesting information about project Natal

Dr. Funkenstein notified me recently about fact that Johnny Chung  Lee is currently working for Microsoft.

For those of you that don’t know that name, Johnny is very famous for his innovative ways how we worked with Wii. Johnny recently graduated with PhD in Human-Computer Interaction.

HCI is really cool if you are interested in new ways how to communicate with your computer, as example what it covers you can watch below video:

Because Natal is gaming project, you can be interested in previous work of Johnny. Have a look at below video – you can see how Wii could work (and it was NOT designed to do so ;)):

Doesn’t it look truly 3D? :) Sure it does. Having a look at Johnny’s blog, you can find following:

If you've been wondering why my project blog has been pretty quiet, I can finally say it is because I have been helping Xbox with Project Natal.

I am starting to be really, really excited about Natal :)

Project Natal

Well, everyone is excited and I am not surprised – project Natal looks very, VERY interesting :)

For those of you that have no clue what we are talking about, check below video:

As you hopefully noticed, I try to blog here about technologies or tips and tricks that are not very famous or I try to post new information.

Project Natal is no difference for me :) So for those of you that are looking forward to any news, here are my wild guesses :)

1.) notice that project Natal is using RGB camera. Doesn’t that ring a bell? Simply have a look at older Microsoft project called Touchless (demo included). Using RGB differentiation between players (even if they swap places) could be easily done

2.) when you want to monitor what Microsoft plans, it’s important to check companies that are acquired. 3DV (Israel) company was sold to Microsoft recently. And if you have a look at below video, maybe you can notice some similarities with project Natal :)

 

Anyway, important information is that Microsoft hired technology, however not people from 3DV company. Therefore this will be (probably) only subset of Natal – bad news is that it means that technology is interesting, however not ready for release yet :( If you would ask me, I would expect it to be released before Christmas 2010, but it’s really just a wild guess.

Martin