Two Fedoras

The future of gaming is… well.  Amazingly bright, or glumly dim, depending on who you talk to.  One of the biggest bones of contention in this debate is the looming presence of motion controls for every major console.  Nintendo’s Wii was first to manage something remotely usable, a classic “tv remote” form factor controller featuring accelerometers and an infra-red detecting camera allowing it to determine orientation relative to the screen.  Microsoft unveiled their Project Natal at E3 2009, comprised of primarily a 3D camera system capable of tracking human bodies with a high degree of accuracy with low latency.  Finally, Sony is also developing a motion controller, reputedly called Arc, consisting of a “wand” device capped with a colored ball which is tracked by the existing Playstation Eye camera.  Only time will tell the true outcome of this war of motion, but as an indie developer and a gamer, I think I have an opinion that might surprise some people:  Microsoft’s Project Natal will win, and I’ll tell you why.

Some History

The existing motion control solution, Nintendo’s Wii, has been both cheered and derided.  For many, it has become an entry into the world of gaming that so called “casual gamers” can pick up and play. Game play is generally found to be intuitive but for some, intuitive means “easy.”  For all the same reasons that the casual gaming crowd has latched onto the Wii’s control mechanics, the older gamers and the “hardcore” have seen the change as a dilution of their favored hobby.  Technically speaking, however, the Wii’s controls are lackluster when attempting to perform fine motor functions, bringing rise to the term “waggle” in reference to the gross movements generally used to play motion controlled Wii games.  Because of both these reasons, both Natal and Arc have been similarly derided by those who follow the progress of the gaming scene.  They believe the upcoming solutions will both also inferior to the controllers of old because it will cater to a less gaming experienced crowd, as well as be an inaccurate input method.  Unfortunately, these ideas can possibly be supported by the information presented by the gaming media to date, where demo games for both systems have been shown which are simplistic and “gimmicky,” as well as players reporting feeling “detached” from the play experience when trying to play them.

Departing

And this is where I depart from the general consensus.  While I do believe that the initial crop of games will fall prey to the “gimmicky” and “casual” traps, it is where the capabilities of the technology branch out from there that will prove Natal the winner.  Here is the key difference:  While both the Wiimote and Arc use accelerometers to measure motion of a handheld controller, Natal uses its 3D camera system to track full body movement.  As such, the Natal technology can accomplish a few tasks the other solutions cannot.

Natal Doesn’t Replace the Controller

Natal supplements the controller.  Yes, most of the initial Natal development will overzealously attempt outdo Nintendo by doing away with a physical controller altogether, but I believe that this tact will fail in general, especially among the more experienced gamer.  Instead, I think the true power of Natal will lie in utilizing available input methods in tandem to achieve results.  A racing game for example, could have the steering motion read by Natal while the controller held in the hands would be used for its far more accurate button presses for gas, brakes and other input.  Don’t like the feel of the default Xbox controller?  No problem with Natal, you can use whatever controller you like, unlike Wii or Arc which locks you into the wand form factor.  (No.  Plastic pieces of crap you stick on a Wiimote do not count.)

Natal Can Do Head Tracking

And head tracking is awesome (at least for a single player).  Way back in early 2008, I was amazed when I watched a video by Johnny Chung Lee, then a student of Carnegie Melon University, using Wii remotes and some homebrew software to track a location in 3d space.  This location, namely the head of a single user, was then used by a simple program to draw a 3D demo scene in such a way that when viewed by that user, the scene would appear incredibly immersive.  In fact, you can still see the video on YouTube.

Johnny Lee is now a researcher at, you guessed it, Microsoft, so you can tell that someone thought what he was working on was very interesting and applicable, and I have no doubt his research will be a part of the Natal toolkit.

To exemplify this point, imagine playing a First Person Shooter with the parallax head motion effect for amazing realism, or even utilizing it for something like looking around a corner without moving the character’s body position.  Even 2D games can make use of the parallax effect for a more captivating motion dynamic.

Natal is a Budget Performance Capture Studio

One thing that Microsoft has prided itself on with the Xbox 360, is the ease of development for their platform, and their heightened focus on indie games.  Their XNA Game studio is wildly popular for hobbyist and indie developers, and there is no doubt that eventually it will include libraries for interfacing with Natal.  Not only does this open up Natal development to the general public and to independent developers, who can be far more clever than “professional” developers at times, it also opens up the stream of data captured by the Natal device.  As such, while a professional motion capture studio is prohibitively expensive in purchasing both hardware and software, Natal can be used as an extremely cheap performance capture solution on a limited basis.  It’s powerful enough to recognize a human body without the usage of a suit of capture points, so imagine what someone could do with the hardware, and a little helpful homebrew software to interpret signals into recorded motion capture.  Especially since this can be accomplished on a PC (where the processor limitation doesn’t precisely exist), and saved where it could later be used for either export to 3d modeling software and applied to a bone solution for replay, or using the Xbox’s content pipeline for easy import and usage for replay in games.

It wasn’t too long ago that rendered 3D art and console development were far from the reach of the modern artist.  And before that, professional level music creation and distribution, as well as movie making.  Advances in technology can bring out revolutions in democratizing art when we least expect it, and I think Natal will be one avenue of opening up another level development possibilities to the average person at home.

Closing

How will this all play out?  I can’t say for certain.  But it’s been interesting to me that in paying attention to the gaming media as all this information comes out, that they have chosen to focus on some aspects of the forthcoming technology that I think will fail.  There are a lot of smart people working on these projects right now, however, and I can only hope that they’re smarter than the media that reports on them.  I for one can’t wait to try an FPS with head tracking, or play with developing some game content using cheap motion capture.