No Touch Play « For Now

No Touch Play

June 22, 2009 at 3:16 pm | In Computers, Games, Hardware, Software, Technology | Leave a Comment

A computer that has no keyboard, mouse or controller? That responds to voice and gesture?

It’s coming to market, only its coming to the gaming market first…
Project Natal, an add-on for the XBox 360…

and yeah, technically it is a controller, but it’s nothing you have to hold or touch. And it is real, although footage so far has all been controlled.

How soon it will be available and how well it will perform in the real world remains to be seen.

But this is not just using motion sensing, it’s using 3D modeling of your environment. Some games will even scan your stuff into the game, as the video demonstrates.

“The human tracking algorithms that the teams have developed are well ahead of the state of the art in computer vision in this domain. The sophistication and performance of the algorithms rival or exceed anything that I’ve seen in academic research, never mind a consumer product.”
– Johnny Chung<

Notably, it’s also “fairly insensitive” to lighting conditions.

This will be interesting to watch…
David