Natal Loses Hardware Chip For Software Solution
Small performance hit, but said to be negligible.
When Natal was revealed to an excitable E3 2009 audience, the motion-detecting peripheral had a hardware chip that helped provide much of the backbone of the technology. Turns out this is no longer the case.
Microsoft has apparently dropped the hardware chip in the Natal, in favour of a software solution instead. The change is not said to affect lag times between the movement of the user and the actions on screen, which at this point is reported to be about 100ms.
A software solution to provide much of the processing power behind the Natal's system also means that Microsoft can update the peripheral more regularly. The affected 'bone system' is now being handled by one of the Xbox 360's three Xenon processors. Apparently this will detract “a percentage” of performance but the actual effect is said to be "negligible".
The company is also said to be helping developers get to grips with getting code to run with the bone system in the future – at least in time for the peripheral's supposed Winter 2010 launch.
Source: GI
Microsoft has apparently dropped the hardware chip in the Natal, in favour of a software solution instead. The change is not said to affect lag times between the movement of the user and the actions on screen, which at this point is reported to be about 100ms.
A software solution to provide much of the processing power behind the Natal's system also means that Microsoft can update the peripheral more regularly. The affected 'bone system' is now being handled by one of the Xbox 360's three Xenon processors. Apparently this will detract “a percentage” of performance but the actual effect is said to be "negligible".
The company is also said to be helping developers get to grips with getting code to run with the bone system in the future – at least in time for the peripheral's supposed Winter 2010 launch.
Source: GI
Companies:
Microsoft
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Comments
dino paladino 7 Jan 2010 16:23
1/4
I'd like to know who the Natal lead researcher is, because clearly implementing via software rather than directly in hardware will have no effect on performance.... tell this to the GPU, ASIC, FPGA, etc. guys. Maybe there are other fundamental physics laws Natal reaserchers can break and put the guys at the Hadron Collider to shame... then win the next 100 Nobel prizes. Man, the marketing fun never stops at MS.
Mr Twit 7 Jan 2010 17:16
2/4
isn't 100ms a lot in the world of interfaces? i remember playing around with a vr setup years ago and the lag on the input was really distracting even though it was pretty small - probably just a few hundred ms
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anon 8 Jan 2010 08:22
3/4
@dino_paladino
Wow... tell that to all the manufacturers of software sound cards and software modems... apparently they have been breaking fundamental laws for years and should be informed of it.
Wow... tell that to all the manufacturers of software sound cards and software modems... apparently they have been breaking fundamental laws for years and should be informed of it.
Dreadknux 8 Jan 2010 11:15
4/4
Mr Twit wrote:
isn't 100ms a lot in the world of interfaces? i remember playing around with a vr setup years ago and the lag on the input was really distracting even though it was pretty small - probably just a few hundred ms
That's 100ms according to Microsoft's last count, which to my knowledge was quite a while ago (might have even been E3 09 in fact) - I'd imagine they'd have closed the gap since then.