Technical and Release Details for Natal Emerge

For those like Me eagerly awaiting the release of the Natal controller for the Xbox 360 for both gameing and more importantly modding the following details should be useful.

Current speculation puts the time of release around November this year with an expected 14 games. The seporate hardware will apparently cost about £50 which for the technology involved seems quite reasonable. This will surely get increased to around the NZ$250 mark here though.

Project Natal release details emerge | Critical Gamer

Microsoft was kind enough to let New Scientist get a hold of one of the units and answered a few of their questions which also prove enlightening. Apparently the Natal system has about a 10 millisecond processing time to recognise a gesture (probably about tripple the wireless latency on the standard controller) and takes about 160 miliseconds to recognise a new player that steps into its field of view.

It uses about 10-15% of the processing power of the Xbox and works by shining an infra-red light on players. The brightness is used to track distance between the two black and white cammeras. It can detect body position to within a cube of about four centimeters and can track 31 body parts in each frame. Even hands using body position when they are out of view.

The host software is about 50MB worth of 'expert system' that was generated by throwing terabytes of position data at a supercomputer which refined it down to a finely coded art.

Microsoft's body-sensing, button-busting controller - tech - 07 January 2010 - New Scientist

Personally I am hopeing that the Natal interface becomes avalible in Windows also for development stuff as I can see some rather usefull applications for it in the future especially if integrated into TVs and possibly moniters in the future.