Letâs start the week with a million-dollar-idea, courtesy of Kotaku, offered for free.
An ideaâs been rattling in my head Iâd like to share (reader warning: Iâm home sick today). Itâs an idea for the Xbox 360âs controller-free control system, Project Natal, for which Iâve been able to get no official comment.
Perhaps folks donât like my idea. Or perhaps they are silenced by its greatness.
So here it is: user-generated motion-capture. Create your own victory animations for characters in Fight Night or Halo or Madden using Natalâs ability to read the movements of your body.
Earlier this month, at E3, I tried Microsoftâs Project Natal and saw how it read my controller-less bodyâs movements with its camera and sensors. I waved my arms or pretended to steer a steering wheel. Stuff happened on screen. To help me understand what was happening, I was shown a monitor that displayed what Natal âsawâ: my body, simplified as a stick figure, with joints matched to my major joints: elbows, shoulders, hips, etc. Natal was identifying my body frame and interpreting its movement, mapping it to the movements of a car in Burnout Paradise or a translucent dodgeball player in the mutant-gym-class demo Ricochet.
https://lastchance.cc/body-on-with-project-natals-controller-free-kick-balls-5278783%3C/a%3E%3C/p%3E
Forget merely taking a picture of oneâs face to create a Fight Night fighter who looks just like you. Instead, stand in front of Natal and act out the pose you want your fighter to strike when heâs introduced by the ring announcer. Customize your wide receiverâs touchdown celebration in Madden. Then have it mapped to the player to perform every time he makes a big play. Tired of seeing people trigger their teabag animation in Halo 3 multiplayer? Create your own per-kill victory animation that you first puppeteered from your living room and map it to the d-pad (obviously this is where the idea gets ESRB-sensitive).
There are technical problems with this idea. User animations might not sync with a gameâs collision rules, making that custom boxer pose in Fight Night a nightmare of fighterâs arms going through nearby trainers and managersâ torsos. There is the problem of inappropriate animations.
And thereâs the problem of having no idea if Natal could do this.
Microsoft doesnât want to talk more about Natal until closer to consumer launch, a rep told me when I asked about the following notion a couple of weeks ago. EA Sports, an outfit I thought would be good to address this, hasnât had anyone available to talk as of last week. Motion capture experts I called late last week have not called me back.
One developer I spoke to who is familiar with Natal thought the idea was do-able, but what do I know about what he knows?
Back at E3, when I was bedazzled by the head-tracking Natal enabled in Peter Molyneuxâs virtual-boy Milo demo, I suggested to a developer of shooter games that such head-tracking would work well in his games. Players could lean in their chairs to look around corners in a game. Good stuff, right? He said youâd not want a feature like that, that it would alienate those who didnât have Natal. If it was going to be an essential mechanic, youâd only want to put head-tracking in games made just for that peripheral. So what kind of Natal-enabled features wouldnât curtail the ability of non-Natal owners to enjoy a game? How about user-generated motion-capture?
https://lastchance.cc/testing-molyneuxs-milo-a-virtual-boy-with-yes-a-dog-5275204%3C/a%3E%3C/p%3E
Bear in mind, this could just be the fever thinking.
