Hawk: Natal not “accurate enough” for Ride

I can’t do ollies, grabs and flips if I’m standing on a skateboard either.

He’s probably still just burned by the non-reaction his appearance prompted at Microsoft’s event.

…but didn’t MS say that they hadn’t sent out dev kits until Monday?

Yeah right!

‘Buy my stupidly expensive, waste of space board that you will probably only spend about 10-15 hours on in your whole life!’

Thing is though…

With Natal, you can still use objects, I’d assume.

I don’t see why you can’t stand on a board, as long as the camera can still see your feet.

Why can’t you hold a controller in each hand too?

The potential of this thing is huge if you can use it in combination with other things…

LOL. In that case (and, now you mention it, I do remember that detail), his team probably tried to get it working with a Live Vision camera! /o\
There’s no way that Microsoft would invite Hawk & co. to their R&D location, just for this…

@DUFFKING: They probably tried it with an eye-toy style camera. I wouldn’t really expect Mr Hawk to know the technical details.

I’m still a little confused about the Ride board… do they expect you to actually jump up and down on that thing and not end up snapping it in half by accidently landing your back foot on the kick?

No, you move your weight to the back, raising the board’s nose, to launch the character into the air.

hmmm… are there videos of people playing this? I’m still unconvinced by it

Gametrailers TV has some PiP footage showing the board motion and what’s going on in the game world, in relation.

“A kid was shown playing a skateboard game using Natal in the reveal videos.”

A kid was shown pretending to play it – at least the scanning of the board looked very dodgy. Unless MS have developed a camera which can see through fingers that is?

I thought the Ride stuff looked awkward but I don’t think this is the last we will hear of Natal not being accurate enough personally.

“but I don’t think this is the last we will hear of Natal not being accurate enough personally.”

I don’t disagree… but remember, there’s no way they had access to test this on Natal tech. As previously stated, it’s likely they tested it on standard eyetoy / webcam style cameras. Unless they were working on their own version.

My biggest concern about NATAL is that it will only work in a well lit room. I play all my PS3 and 360-games via a beamer/projector in a completely dark or at least dimmed down room, and my guess is that I’m not the only one gaming like this.

NATAL will not be functional in this kind of environment!

As I understand it… you could use Natal in pretty much any lighting because it relies mostly upon infra red rather than visible light.

Some info from one of the guys working on the tech here:
http://procrastineering.blogspot.com/2009/06/project-natal.html

He’s probably still just burned by the non-reaction his appearance prompted at Microsoft’s event.

No, he’s probably completely right. I immediately had doubts about its performance, and I will do until I get to try it for myself. There are too many variables.

Thanks for the info, Psychotext!
But I’m still sceptical …

@Psychotext
Fair enough. All the headlines say Natal – TH actually said camera. Not the first time this sort of thing has happened. Though I’m pretty sure they implied some 3rd parties had been given access to this tech? Maybe they had just been shown it.