» Xbox 360 Project Natal: Full-Body Motion Control
Microsoft’s Project Natal for the Xbox 360 is pretty amazing. What’s more amazing is, while the demo (watch the video) is impressive, it’s a very basic implementation of a concept which will explode in the next several years: tiny, cheap, wirelessly networked, ubiquitous sensors (cameras and mics) which passively transmit large amounts of data to various hubs (the Xbox being the first one, but maybe your AC and heating system, your electrical system or anything else). These hubs, which contain powerful processors, will then aggregate, extrapolate, and analyze this data in real-time. Some of this will happen on your local network, but other applications will feed this data out to global services via the Internet.
What’s telling is that Microsoft’s current implementation of this (two cameras, side by side) is so basic, yet delivers such a massive improvement in home gaming and applications. One camera gets you a flat picture. Two cameras gets you two flat pictures. However, two cameras combined gets you a rough three-dimensional image — the analysis of which provides a ton more information than two flat pictures. With every new sensor added to the system, the amount of raw data increases linearly, but the actual amount of information which can be extracted and interpolated from that data grows exponentially — conveniently the hubs’ processing power will grow exponentially too.
In addition to this, the cost, size, and energy consumption of the devices will all continue to decrease over time, while their resolution and fidelity will increase.
Don’t be surprised if, in a couple years, your living room resembles a Hollywood-quality motion capture studio, but instead of performing in front of a green screen, you’ll be performing in your own feature film as it’s created around you in real-time. Laser-retinal-implant-projected virtual reality Matrix-on-the-Holodeck, here we come.
June 02, 2009, 7:02pm Comments and Permalink
