Features// Natal: Hands-On and How it Works

He was keen to stress that the infra-red array was the key technology, adding that: “Because it’s infra-red, Natal works in bright light or total darkness.” We could see it working in real-time, with people walking in front of it, then standing still – it didn’t appear to take much longer than a second to lock on and generate a skeleton. And it can process up to four bodies.

Nor should it be put off by, say, the dog running in front of you when you’re playing; Tsunoda said: “It doesn’t mind occlusions: if it can see some of your joints, it can algorithmically work out what you are doing, even if some are hidden.”

Tsunoda added that the demos shown at E3 were built on Unreal Engine 3, and one was shown: a form of Breakout in which you look down a virtual corridor with bricks blocking the far end, that you had to smash by propelling football-sized balls with whatever part of your body seemed appropriate. You could kick them, head them, bat them with your hands and so on; move forward or back and your ghost-outline avatar displayed in the game did likewise.

And Microsoft showed a bog-standard copy of Burnout Paradise working with the system, so that you stood with hands out as if gripping an imaginary steering wheel, and moved them as if steering. Amazingly, it worked with all the necessary responsiveness. To accelerate, you just step forward with your right foot; step back to brake. It was a bit of a shame that they hadn’t implemented an imaginary handbrake.

Quite when Project Natal will come out and, especially, how much it will cost (while much of its power lies in its programming, it still has high-quality sensors and a powerful processor in it) are anyone’s guess. But the fact that it already works with such a minimal amount of fuss means that the limiting factor will be the developers currently having a whale of a time working out how best to use it. It almost seems a waste to just tack it onto existing games, but it’s definitely the sort of thing that will get developers’ creative juices frothing. Surely we’ll all be able to get our hands on it next year at some point, and when we can, Microsoft will have some serious ammunition with which to attack the Wii.