Microsoft might be busy extending and building on the Xbox 360’s capabilities with Project Natal and all manner of NXE and Live updates, but it sounds like some of their third-party devs think they’re running out of headroom — in an interview with the Official Xbox Magazine, EA senior VP Patrick Soderlund said that “we’ve maxed out the 360 but we haven’t maxed out the PS3.” That’s an interesting parallel to what Miyamoto was just saying about the Wii, of course, but it doesn’t seem like the situation is entirely dire: Soderlund also said that he’s “truly impressed” with the 360 and that he “would have a headache” if he were running Sony. Still, that doesn’t bode well for Microsoft’s planned 10-year 360 lifecycle if it’s true — we’ll see if Redmond has something new for us before 2015 after all.
It doesn’t come as a surprise that Sony and Microsoft are hard at work at motion controls for their respective consoles: Nintendo is eating their lunch. The Wii’s incredible appeal with the average consumer — due primarily to the accessibility and charm of its Wiimote motion controls — has also created an annoying divide in the industry (real or perceived) between consumers who use embarrassing gestures to control meaningless mini-games, and those who memorize incredibly complex control schemes to control deeper and more “mature” experiences. There’s been a small amount of crossover, of course, but since Sony and Microsoft have lacked most of the gestures option, a majority of it has taken place on the Wii — the inclusion of an accelerometer in Sony’s Sixaxis controller has had little impact on gameplay, and Sony’s EyeToy 2 has had even less impact on the average gamer.
Of course, that’s all about to change next year, with the emergence of the Microsoft’s Project Natal and Sony’s PlayStation motion controller. Typical thinking would suggest that Sony and Microsoft will be attempting to capture a slice of the casual gaming market that the Wii has so well dominated, while also expanding on the Wii’s capabilities at serving the hardcore gamer — some capabilities which Nintendo itself is attempting to add to the Wii with the even more imminent MotionPlus add-on. So, does anyone here have what it takes to serve up the next generation of gaming controls to everybody, or do cost considerations and the current state of the console wars dictate an ongoing rift in the market? Let’s weigh our options…
It’s no secret that Sony’s has a ten-year lifecycle (or longer) in mind for all of its consoles, but Microsoft has so far been a bit less clear cut when it comes to talking about its long-term plans. That now looks to be changing, however, as Microsoft Shane Kim has told VentureBeat that the company “firmly” believes that the Xbox 360 “has a life cycle through 2015,” or exactly ten years since it launched. That minor revelation came in the same interview where Kim also discussed Project Natal at length, which, he notes, would fit “mid-cycle” into the Xbox 360’s lifetime, so who knows what Microsoft has in store for the 360’s twilight years.
Microsoft’s Project Natal took a step away from the stage and closer to the living room when Gizmodo’s Matt Buchanan and Mark Wilson took the system for a test drive.
While the preview did consist of some of the same style of tech demos we saw on Monday, the exciting part involved playing Burnout Revenge, an existing 360 game, with the system. The game was able to run even with Natal‘s processing overhead, controlled via an air steering wheel and moving feet forward and backward to represent the gas.
Despite their dedicated efforts to get the system to hiccup, Gizmodo was impressed with the device, commenting on how natural and polished the experience felt. Despite the usual pre-production glitches, Natal seems ready to take on the gaming world whenever it comes out. Video after the jump.
When Microsoft shows off a motion-sensing system shortly after it’s been revealed that is has acquired a motion-sensing camera maker, it’s easy to see how people can draw conclusions that the two are related. But according to Microsoft, that is not the case, and its Project Natal is actually based on work that has been “going on for a long time.” That word comes from a VentureBeat interview with Microsoft’s Shane Kim, who further added that “none of those rumors did justice to what we were actually doing with Project Natal,” and that it’s based on a lot of past work Microsoft has done in natural user interfaces, including voice recognition. The folks at Eurogamer were also able to get an even more definitive statement from Microsoft’s Aaron Greenberg, who said flatly that “we built this in house.” Interestingly, however, Shane Kim did say that Microsoft wants to “ensure that we have great intellectual property protection,” and that “it has to be all buttoned up, legally,” which could offer a bit more rationale for the 3DV buyout.
One hands-on with Project Natal would make for a nice story, but it wouldn’t be complete. So we’re giving you two full sets of impressions on Microsoft’s motion-capturing E3 bombshell.
Matt Buchanan tested Project Natal today, as did I. Here is his personal take on the technology right alongside mine. We did not share our independent experiences before pasting the text below. Neither of us were allowed to shoot what was happening on screen—hence the crazy pics of our bodily reactions, and that intensely audible racing-game video.
How Natal Works The test system was an ordinary Xbox 360, connected to small PC and camera that simulates the final Natal rig. There are two cameras—one RGB, for face recognition and display video, and one infrared, for tracking movement and depth. Why infrared? The eye doesn’t see infrared light. And when you combine an infrared camera with an infrared emitter (also part of Natal), a room is flooded with a spectrum of invisible light that works in the dark.
Natal also has its own internal processing system handling an unspecified amount of the heavy lifting behind Natal’s cleaver image and speech recognition. It breaks the human body into 48 points tracked in real time, and it can sense your whole body in Z space, or depth. In fact, on a heat map that measured depth, my hands appeared hotter than my shoulders—because they were closer.
Natal is so smart, in fact, that, if your room is narrowed by a pair of couches, it can signal to a game to narrow the level. It can see about 15′ x 20′ of a room, according to project leader Kudo Tsunoda’s informal estimation.
Breakout Matt: My first taste was talking to the father of Project Natal, Kudo Tsunoda and watching as his simple, small hand gestures were mapped perfectly onto the screen. He started up the ballsmacker demo you might have seen in our liveblog, knocking a swarm of balls into wall with every part of his body.
When Kudo gestured to me try it, I jumped right in and immediately started smacking at balls with my hands and feet and knees and arms and head as one ball exploded into many, like a virus, until I was doing sad white ninja jerking and jumping movements. Kudo didn’t tell me how to “set it up” or what to do. I just did it. You have to realize, Kudo towers over me. I didn’t have to calibrate it to my body size, or stand in a weird way for it to adjust. It just worked. Well, until I broke it at the end—it froze up after a few rounds and had to be rebooted for Mark. Hey, it’s an early tech demo, so don’t read into it. Until that point, it worked remarkably, incredibly well—better than I expected, honestly. The bright fluorescent lights were turned off and on, and Natal didn’t flinch. My real movements translated exactly how I expected them to—the precise position, velocity—90 percent of the time, no matter how ridiculously I moved, and some of the other 10 percent might’ve just been my own bad timing. But the result is a remarkable sense of control. Immersion.
Mark: Microsoft loaded the 3D Breakout demo we saw at their press conference. I stepped up to a white piece of tape right after Matt, and given that I’m 4 inches taller, Natal needed to account for my larger size.
After about 10 seconds, the blue, ghost-like figure filled in. And he was both taller and bigger-handed than Matt’s avatar. Natal noticed that I’m a bigger guy. It made no adjustments for the fact that I’m also better looking.
The first thing I noticed was a slight lag I hadn’t intended. It’s not horrible, but my avatar moved a hair more slowly than I did. That didn’t stop me from reaching up, spiking the imaginary ball at a wall imaginary bricks, and then flailing around to keep up with 2, 3, 4, 5 and more spheres flying at me at once.
My avatar recognized both my pitiful kicks and swipes. And while my avatar never left the ground when I jumped, this turned out to be but an animation limitation within Microsoft’s tech demo. My wireframe preview image and heatmap did leave the ground. Besides, this is nitpicking. On the PS2 I played Nike Kinetic, something a bit similar. And I always wanted to be having fun. But on Natal, even in a stuffy windowless room surrounded by Microsoft execs, I was having fun. (Disregard my stern, focused face in these pictures.)
Burnout Revenge Matt: The Burnout racing-game demo was a little more abstract—in one sense, I almost wished I had a wheel to turn, a pedal to press, because I wanted the feedback. I had trouble getting used to “pressing” the gas, which you do by moving your right foot forward. I threw myself off-balance by taking a ginormous step toward the Frankenstein’s lab of demo equipment along the wall (upon which I could see myself represented in infared, covered in boxes like smallpox). But turning my air steering wheel, I felt completely in control. A lot of that was the software—it registered even the smallest pivots of my elbows that sent my forearms right or left—but the way it responded exactly how I expected it to is what made it feel so natural. Which is the real key here. It feels natural.
After I hit full speed on a straightaway, I tried to do a 180. I crashed into a wall and died. Normally, that’d make me bad. But I couldn’t stop smiling that I’d held the future of gaming control in my hands—and it was simply air.
Mark: As soon as Matt crashed, I greedily jumped in, asking him if it was OK but not waiting for him to answer. I wanted to play Natal more, and I’ve played a ton of Burnout.
Burnout showcases a few important points for Microsoft. First, it’s a real game that’s been on the 360. So Natal doesn’t weigh down on the processors so hard that you can’t play games. Second, it requires fine motor control.
I raised my hands in the air, mining a steering wheel. I hadn’t given the system any time to scan my body after kicking Matt out, but I stepped by foot forward, signaling the gas all the same. The car accelerated. I twisted my arms. The car turned just the right amount.
Microsoft had clearly tweaked the Burnout code a bit, forcing the car to feel a bit more like a powerful sedan than a street illegal beast out of some Fast and Furious sequel. And I’m guessing that Natal’s ever so slight control delay was masked by the feeling of a looser-driving steering wheel that we find in more standard cars.
So I floor it, growing confident as I wave through traffic and slowly build speed. I reach maximum velocity, throw my foot back to break, cut the wheel and toss the car into a spin. Yes. This feels right. Just right.
Holy shit.
But Natal can’t work this well. It just CAN’T. I need to break it, teach this Microsoft prototype a little humility. What if I stand on my tip toes and steer eight feet in the air?
The car handles fine.
What if I kneel on the ground and steer?
Yup, it still works, save for a moment when my knee shifted and I tricked the machine—a fair mistake, even by my highly ridiculous dork standards.
Closing Thoughts Matt: Project Natal is the vision of gaming that’s danced through people’s heads for decades—gaming without the abstraction of controllers, using your body and natural movements—which came more sharply into focus when Nintendo announced the Wii a few years ago. I haven’t been quite this blown away by a tech demo in a long time. It looked neat onstage at Microsoft’s keynote. Seeing it, feeling it in person, makes me want to believe that this what the future of gaming looks like—no buttons, no joysticks, no wands. The only thing left to get rid of is the screen, and even that’ll happen soon enough.
Mark: 2010…or maybe even 2011…is just too long to wait. I want Natal now.
We had a chance to go one-on-one with Project Natal — as well as its steward, Kudo Tsunoda — and we wanted to give you a little insight on Microsoft’s next big play. Plus, how could we pass up an opportunity to show off a video of us essentially flailing around like teenagers on a coffee high?
The first thing to note is that Microsoft is very protective of the actual technology right now, so they weren’t letting us film or photograph any of the box itself, though what they had was an extremely rough version of what the device will look like (not at all like the press shot above). It consisted of a small, black box aimed out into the room — about the size of a Roku Player — with sensors along the front. It almost looked a bit like a mid-size (between pico and full size) projector.
All of the major E3 keynotes from Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony are over. While 2009 is now officially the year of motion controls, there’s still something missing. Here’s what we expected to see at E3, but didn’t.
Price Cuts The financiapocalypse has yielded no price cuts for ailing gamers from Sony, Nintendo or Microsoft. A PS3 still hurts at $400, a real Xbox costs $300 (with downloadable retail games on the way, you need that hard drive), and a Wii still costs $250. Not to mention the true price of owning these consoles—$60 $80 for a complete Wiimote (can’t forget MotionPlus, which Miyamoto said yesterday could be required for the next Wii Zelda), $50 a year for Xbox Live—also remains unchanged. This is undoubtedly part and parcel of this generation’s extended lifespan, but parts and manufacturing prices have fallen, so they’re all presumably recouping more money than ever on their consoles. If they’re serious about picking up new gamers, they need to make it affordable.
PS3 Slim Sony inevitably slenderizes every console, and the PS3 is an effin’ monster. The PSP Go shows they’re still very much on board on the shrink ray as a way to generate sales. The PS3 costs them less than ever to make—just think how much more they’d save if they didn’t have to pay for all of that extra plastic? (OK, maybe they’d have to pay more for the smaller guts.) But we’ve seen possible branding for it, just maybe. Are they saving it for motion controls?
Zune, Zune, Zune We really expected more ZuneHD to be a part of Microsoft’s E3 keynote, given the barebone announcement that left us parched for more details. ZuneHD wasn’t mentioned once.
Also, Microsoft promised “at E3 next week, attendees will see firsthand how Zune integrates into Xbox LIVE to create a game-changing entertainment experience.” Um, we must’ve missed that. Zune Video Marketplace moved onto Xbox Live was all we caught. When we asked Xbox Live’s Marc Whitten yesterday where Zune audio was, he pointed at Last.fm. And about what we can expect from deeper Zune integration, we got a more or less canned response that they’ll be continuing to grow the service and move toward more integration. Not very satisfying.
Live Anywhere Nearly three years later, and one year after being assured the project is still alive, Microsoft’s Live Anywhere—the service that’ll let you tap into Live from anywhere—is still nowhere. Which is absolutely baffling, given everything Microsoft’s added to the Live service since the New Xbox Experience and all of the “cloud” work they’ve been doing. Live Anywhere fits perfectly with all of that. There’s really no good explanation for why Live Anywhere is still MIA.
But we asked Whitten where it was, just for good measure. He said they’re focusing on the living-room experience here at E3, and since that extends onto other devices, it’s for another time and place. Ooooookay. Maybe when we see that deeper Zune integration?
A Bigger, Better Wii Balance Board and More Wii MotionPlus Games While Nintendo didn’t fail to come through with a new piece of potentially gimmicky hardware (notice they didn’t even have a game to go with it, and Miyamoto himself was vague on WTF it’s for), Wii Fit Plus is the same old Wii Fit from a hardware perspective. We hoped a Wii Fit Plus would come with a Balance Board Plus—a smarter board that’s even bigger for people who don’t have Japan-sized feet. It’s one new hardware peripheral we wouldn’t have minded one bit.
A year after announcing the Wii MotionPlus, the game pickins for it still look a bit slim. Nintendo announced a handful of titles yesterday that’ll make use of it, like Sega’s Virtua Tennis 2009 and the new Tiger Woods Golf from EA (which’ll have it bundled) but it’s disappointing they didn’t have more to show at this stage of the game. During yesterday’s Q&A, Miyamoto said that it might be required for the next Zelda on Wii, depending on how widely it’s adopted—so whether we see it used in more games may very well be dependent on how well it does with the initial load of titles. So it’s odd there isn’t well, more of them to start to really get the ball rolling.
So that’s what we really missed at E3—well, all that and Hulu. What did you guys really hope to see?
What is Project Natal? Is it a fancy motion controller? Is it an easy way to talk to your TV? Is it a new way to use the 360 or Live? No, to Microsoft, it’s much more. It’s the goal.
Talking to Marc Whitten, Microsoft’s Xbox Live General Manager, he’s happy to show you last.fm, Sky, Facebook or Twitter, the latest services to be announced for Xbox Live. But these are just updates, part of Live’s slow evolution to…something bigger. And you can see that in Whitten’s body language when he hears “Natal.” He goes from somewhat stiff and professionally cordial to shifting restlessly in his seat with sparkling eyes, like a kid who just wants to get back to his favorite toy.
As it happens, Natal is precisely what Microsoft’s Xbox 360 Live team is and has been working toward since at least the development of NXE (though surely earlier, especially from a pure hardware perspective). And according to Whitten, it’s the last step of Live.
You can have an amazing Live experience without Natal and you can have an amazing Natal experience without Live. But the magic, the endgame, the place that we’re going in this social world in the living room is [Natal and Live] tied together. We spend a ton of time on how we’re going to reimagine the future with this idea of controlerless gaming and Live together.
To be fair, “endgame” was my word originally, but Whitten, a man ever so careful with his diction, couldn’t help but to use it. He sees entertainment and communication converging on Live, and he sees Natal as the way to assemble it all in your living room.
Indeed, if Natal works as well as advertised it’s hard to see the technology, the idea, as anything less. You know, at least until we get the holodeck. [Image]
The original Xbox launched in November 2001, with the Xbox 360 following just four years later, the shortest console cycle ever. The four-year anniversary of the 360 is five months away, but yesterday Microsoft proclaimed that “the future of home entertainment has a new name: Xbox 360.” Huh.
It became remarkably clear today that Microsoft sees more than months left in the Xbox 360—more like years. Microsoft’s big ballyhoo, its motion control Project Natal, won’t even arrive until 2010. And likely deep into 2010—think next summer. The Zune Video Marketplace will deliver 1080p instant streams; you’ll be able to download full retail games come August, cutting out the Gamestop middleman; Netflix integration is even deeper; and Facebook and Twitter are now wrapped in. Why would Microsoft do all this for a console progressing into obsolescence in the next year or two? It’s not simply pumping out new games or features—they’re growing and entrenching the current platform.
Sure, there’s a incentive to extend this console cycle simply because of the high costs of development—the time and money that goes into producing a major game for the Xbox and PS3 easily approaches that of a (small) Hollywood film because of their enormous complexity. There’s still returns to be made on this generation. So perhaps Sony wasn’t so foolish for declaring that the PS3 is a ten-year console. The Wii is markedly cheaper, simpler and less powerful, so part of me suspects you will see a new console from Nintendo more quickly than from Microsoft and Sony.
But it’s more than that, especially when you consider how Microsoft and Sony are extending the life of their machines—they’re turning them into platforms beyond gaming consoles. Xbox Live’s Marc Whitten remarked at the Xbox party tonight that a big part of the reason behind the New Xbox Experience was to build the framework for these features. It’s interesting to think about the NXE as not simply the UI overhaul and stuff we reviewed a few months ago—it’s everything after that. We are squarely in Xbox 360 2.0.
Think of it another way: If we were talking about all of these new features on a computer or mobile—Netflix streaming, Last.fm, Zune Marketplace, Remote Play—what we would call them instead of features? Apps. That’s what makes this generation more platform than console—they have apps that tap into and expand their power in new and different ways, just like apps do on any other kind of platform.
But so far, we’ve only seen first-party apps. Or at best, closely partnered third-party apps. It’s effectively a closed system. Which reminds of us of another formerly closed system. The iPhone. It did some neat things before iPhone 2.0. But it was painfully limited. The iPhone wasn’t truly powerful until it got apps. Until it allowed basically anybody to develop apps for it, not just the chosen few (well, Google). That’s exactly what the Xbox 360 and PS3 need to live even longer. And not just longer lives, but better, richer lives. Cheap SDKs for anybody to develop apps. Just think of how long ago Twitter would’ve come to Xbox.
It’s already halfway there—you stream videos, download software, apply updates, listen to music, social network—and only going even further in that direction with the stuff we’re seeing it at E3, that the old, artificial distinction between these consoles and “real computers,” which was already laughable, is completely obsolete. So that objection, that consoles aren’t supposed to be like computers, they’re supposed to be self-contained is completely meaningless. It’s time to open the Xbox 360 and PS3 to apps, so we can see what they can really do.
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Microsoft might be busy extending and building on the Xbox 360’s capabilities with Project Natal and all manner of NXE and Live updates, but it sounds like some of their third-party devs think they’re running out of headroom — in an interview with the Official Xbox Magazine, EA senior VP Patrick Soderlund said that “we’ve maxed out the 360 but we haven’t maxed out the PS3.” That’s an interesting parallel to what Miyamoto was just saying about the Wii, of course, but it doesn’t seem like the situation is entirely dire: Soderlund also said that he’s “truly impressed” with the 360 and that he “would have a headache” if he were running Sony. Still, that doesn’t bode well for Microsoft’s planned 10-year 360 lifecycle if it’s true — we’ll see if Redmond has something new for us before 2015 after all.
One hands-on with 
Matt: My first taste was talking to the father of Project Natal, Kudo Tsunoda and watching as his simple, small hand gestures were mapped perfectly onto the screen. He started up the ballsmacker demo you might have seen in our liveblog, knocking a swarm of balls into wall with every part of his body.
Mark: Microsoft loaded the 3D Breakout demo we saw at their press conference. I stepped up to a white piece of tape right after Matt, and given that I’m 4 inches taller, Natal needed to account for my larger size.
Matt: The Burnout racing-game demo was a little more abstract—in one sense, I almost wished I had a wheel to turn, a pedal to press, because I wanted the feedback. I had trouble getting used to “pressing” the gas, which you do by moving your right foot forward. I threw myself off-balance by taking a ginormous step toward the Frankenstein’s lab of demo equipment along the wall (upon which I could see myself represented in infared, covered in boxes like smallpox). But turning my air steering wheel, I felt completely in control. A lot of that was the software—it registered even the smallest pivots of my elbows that sent my forearms right or left—but the way it responded exactly how I expected it to is what made it feel so natural. Which is the real key here. It feels natural.
Mark: As soon as Matt crashed, I greedily jumped in, asking him if it was OK but not waiting for him to answer. I wanted to play Natal more, and I’ve played a ton of Burnout.
All of the major E3 keynotes from Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony are over. While 2009 is now officially the year of motion controls, there’s still something missing. Here’s what we expected to see at E3, but didn’t.
What is 
The original Xbox launched in November 2001, with the 
