We present to you our info-packed, first-hand, behind closed doors impressions of Xbox 360's stunning new killer app, chat to Kudo Tsunoda and Peter Molyneux, and explain why some of its critics are really missing the point.
At a dinner party last year, British game designer Peter Molyneux told me he and Microsoft wanted to "shock and awe" the industry at GDC with the unveiling of his long-shrouded, top-secret 'Dimitri' project. They may have missed its originally planned GDC unveiling in March, but "shock and awe" is exactly what they did at E3 in Los Angeles last week, with the unveiling of Natal.
At the end of Microsoft's E3 press conference, I was left speechless when Natal was revealed. Thinking about Natal's potential, I'd say it's one of the most inspiring things I've seen revealed at a press conference in well over ten years of sitting through them. However, not everyone is as convinced as I am.
Natal is a new peripheral for Xbox 360 that currently exists in a very early work-in-progress form. This new, 'full body motion sensing' technology may be revolutionary for interactive entertainment, and quite frankly, leaves things like EyeToy, Wii MotionPlus, and Sony's new motion sensing controllers for PS3 - also revealed last week - in the dust. Anyone who doesn't yet understand why, this article is for you.
There's a lot of positive buzz about Natal, but I was surprised to see how much doubt and even indifference there is about it after talking to everyone about it over the last week. Critics and fence-sitters of Natal seem to consistently be saying one of only a few things against it. I'm going to explain why they're missing the point, and why this thing is the real deal, based on my first-hand experience with it behind closed doors, as well as chats with project manager Branden Powell, and the heavyweight developers who showed it off, Kudo Tsunoda and Peter Molyneux.
The first thing detractors are saying is that we, as serious gamers, aren't interested in jumping about in front of the TV. The second thing they're saying is that there is no release date in sight. And the final thing they're saying is that they get it, but they just don't believe that it works - and that they noticed glitches and bugs when it was demonstrated at the conference.
OK, so first off, serious gamers aren't interested in jumping about in front of the TV. Right? Irrelevant. David Cage, developer of promising PS3 exclusive Heavy Rain, is one of the people in this category - this was his sentiment when I asked his opinion on Natal last week. And yet, the very next question I asked him about Sony's newly unveiled motion controller, provoked a more positive, "variety is good" type response. This sort of illustrates my point: everyone who's trying to innovate with motion control is in the same boat here, so to make the demographic argument against one solution and not another really only exposes some form of platform bias. Moreover, the popularity of Wii with all kinds of gamer, and the proven willingness of millions of people to move about in front of their TV, are facts which cancel out the argument.
It's also obvious that Natal has the potential for many types of experience, not just the kind that will give you a workout: while the tech demos that Kudo showed on stage (and which I've since had a go on) are fairly active experiences, the racing game experience (a modified, controller-less version of Burnout) and Peter Molyneux's character interaction experience ('Milo and Kate' - formerly 'Project Dimitri', as we have known it for years now) are far less physically demanding - and yet, certainly no less engaging; both are completely new experiences, that highlight the advanced abilities of Natal's functionality.
Natal is, in fact, light years ahead of the game control methods you've got in Wii MotionPlus, or Sony's new motion controller (both technically pretty comparable as far as I can tell). Why? You've seen the videos of this thing being demonstrated, right? Were it not for Kudo explaining to me exactly how Natal works, I'd only be able to guess 'by magic'. The functionality of a device which you hold, containing accelerometers and such, is easy to comprehend. But how this Natal product enables an Xbox 360 to render an entirely digital, on-screen version of you as your Xbox 360 avatar (or anything for that matter - you could be E.T. if you want), and have it move about in real time in perfect synchrony with you anywhere in the room? No controller can offer that fluidity of movement and control. That is surely magic, especially since the player is not holding any device of any kind, and not wearing any white markers as they would be in a traditional motion capture environment, like you've seen in 'making of' documentaries.
But it's not magic, it's real; Kudo told me that it's actually some really smart infra-red 'radar'-like trickery that accurately perceives players in 3D space, simultaneously tracking over 48 joints on your body, enabling it to accurately redraw your skeleton in real time as you move about. On a separate 'debug screen' in the closed-doors session, we could witness for ourselves the 'mind's eye' of Natal, visually showing how it completely understands where we are, how we're moving, where we are in 3D space, how far in front of my face my hand is, whatever. It can supposedly even track individual hand and finger movement when it switches into this more finely-tuned mode.
I still don't really understand how this works just with infra-red technology and smart software - but it really does work. Back at the conference, I watched 'Ricochet' (the very rapid, fast-paced, player-smashes-bouncy-balls-back-at-destructible-blocks demo) with my own eyes, very closely, and noted its unfakable, highly responsive, 1:1 accuracy. And then at this private session, I was able to play it myself and confirm its authenticity; not only did it just work with no 'calibration' needed, but the experience of it is like nothing I've experience in any type of game or entertainment before. There is a surprising feeling of tactility and iPhone-like fluidity and precision to the way Natal works, and I believe anyone who has a go on this will be instantly convinced.
This device also boasts face recognition and voice recognition, while its software has the ability to recognise what you are saying and how you are saying it, and calculate a response - as shown off in the Milo and Kate demo, which literally took my breath away when it was shown last Monday. With assistance from Peter, I later 'met' this simulated ten year-old boy myself, and after responding "hi, Adam" when I introduced myself to him, Milo complimented my choice of a blue shirt. I went on to tell him I'd had a pretty good week during E3, but that I had lost my iPhone the night before. His expression changed to be more empathetic. How is that even possible? Magic?
Again: it's not magic - it's real. Molyneux told me that this 'emotional AI' is actually something they've been working on for a long time (Project Dimitri was first mentioned in 2002!) and that when he saw Natal, he knew this was the perfect way to bring this "flagship technology project" (as he described it to us back in 2004) to life. The voice recognition software - which was actually developed elsewhere within Microsoft and apparently features in the upcoming Windows 7 - had detected the changing intonation in my voice when I mentioned losing the phone. Lionhead has programmed Milo to respond accordingly. I'm sorry, but anyone who doesn't think this is hugely impressive, I can't really convince any further about Natal.
So it's much, much better than the other motion-related products out there, plain and simple. It can do anything MotionPlus can do and so, so much more. How does all this relate back to critic point number one, which I'm aiming to debunk? Because the potential for Natal to offer new ways of playing traditional core game genres is not really debatable, nor is the scope for entirely new genres. It's for these reasons that the active/passive game argument is really kind of irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.
OK, so point number two, there is no release date in sight. Wii MotionPlus is here today. People are enjoying the latest version of Wii Sports and EA's Grand Slam Tennis on it, today. That's all well and good, but to echo point one, Natal is technology that is in a different league. It's like a whole generation ahead in console generation terms. Of course it's not out yet, but so what? This doesn't really count against Natal as a new technology, it just makes a rather obvious observation and if anything, underlines the fact that it's probably a lot more advanced because it was revealed 11 months after MotionPlus was.
On to the third thing. "I get it", people say, "but I don't believe it works". People have noticed glitches, right? And I heard it can't detect black people!
I'm going to jump right into to this "it can't detect black people" thing and tell you right now it's BULLSHIT. Not only can it detect black people, it can detect players perfectly even with the LIGHTS TURNED OFF. I saw this demonstrated in the private session: Kudo had the lights dimmed to almost zero, and the Ricochet demo continued, completely unaffected. You don't need to worry about ideal lighting conditions like with EyeToy. Natal does not track players by colour (although we know from Milo commenting on my blue short that it can if it wants to); it tracks them by infra-red - and it can track up to four people at the same time with no compromises.
The reason there is a thing going around about Natal not being able to detect black players is that a black journalist had difficulty controlling the Burnout demo. Guess what? So did a white female that was in my closed-doors session. I could make a 'women drivers' gag at this point, but I won't because this is a serious point. The Burnout demo was probably not the most finely tuned thing Microsoft could have used to demonstrate Natal, and could have done with some further optimisation. The fact that many people of all colours who've tried this particular demo have had difficulty trying to steer about, accelerating by putting right foot forwards, only shows that this is probably a bit of a last minute demo to have modified - it's another company's game code, essentially hacked into a makeshift Natal demo. Kudo stated in the session that it was not designed specifically for Natal and that it was just to make the point that Natal has no latency issues when it comes to fast paced games like racing games. It certainly does not mean that this is something specifically to do with dark-skinned players. I hope we're quite clear on this.
People also noticed a couple of glitches during the conference demo, for example, when Kudo turned his back to the audience and lifted up one foot to show the sole of the avatar's shoe, apparently the shoe glitched up to the torso area at one point. I've not had time to rewatch the conference, but assuming such glitches are indeed noticeable, it really doesn't matter. Such glitches are software issues that are fixable, they are not indicative of some sort of fundamental flaw in concept or in hardware. People looking at technology that is so new and early in development need to understand that glitches occur. This is standard disclaimed stuff, people. We should all be used to it. It's why journalists don't review games from preview code - at least, why they're not supposed to. These minor bugs are all completely fixable, and the important thing is that the technology - the hardware - behind Natal works. And to reiterate, it does work, and it's also incredibly responsive, too.
Natal was a stunning conclusion to what was already one of Microsoft's strongest ever Xbox press conferences. It was the highlight of E3 for me, and I can't wait to see what developers come up with. Peter Molyneux keeps mentioning how the Milo demo provokes emotions in people when they get to experience it. I felt pretty emotional about what I was seeing at the end of that press conference, if only because I knew I was witnessing something that really is new, for the first time. It's the hope that unique moments like these might happen, that make me get my arse onto a plane to keep going back to things like E3 every year. It's the chance to be the first to actually interact with technology that newspapers the world over wrote about during the subsequent days, technology which A-list celebrities turned up at E3 to try and check out, and which people like Steven Spielberg are happy to go on a stage and publicly endorse, that keep me enthusiastic about this industry. Natal is something that's instantly approachable, which is relevant to traditional, core gamers as well as those who've not even been tempted by the Wii yet.
I noticed there are reports that Shigeru Miyamoto checked out Natal during the show, too. It's true; I was there when he was. In fact, he stole my session. Natal's project manager Branden Powell was freaking out about it when Miyamoto was in his Natal area - first with Kudo, then with Peter. What the reports don't tell you is what Miyamoto thinks about Natal. I know what he thinks about Natal because I asked him directly when he came out of the demo. He said he liked it, nodding enthusiastically when I asked him if it was "good". So that's a world exclusive right there, I'm pretty sure.
I will end by saying that the first person to figure out how to successfully combine Natal technology with one of the other hot prospects I checked out last week, 3D, could be on to something really quite remarkable.
If you haven't seen the videos of Natal yet, you may well still struggle to understand what it's about, so you absolutely must check them out and bear in mind from someone who was there - it's the real deal.
und das man beide hände nicht frei hat meistens is auch teils nachvollziehbar, wer schießt mit 1 hand mitm MG 
