Microsoft’s ‘Project Natal’ Revolutionizes Gaming

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Staff Writer Lazaro Gutierrez
March 16, 2010
Filed under Entertainment

Close your eyes. Imagine a car, any car. Now, pretend you’re in the driver’s seat and driving the car. You push the pedals and twist the steering wheel; you might even dare to shift gears manually. Open your eyes. You find that on the screen in front of you there is a car and you’re controlling it with… nothing. This is the vision of Microsoft and their new product, Project Natal.

Project Natal is a revolutionary leap in the way that we play video-games that will allow completely controller-less control of your console instead of waving a controller around like with the Wii. Sounds simple enough, right? But most cameras just snap images without having any idea what they’re looking at. To make Natal work, Microsoft has to teach its camera to understand what it sees. It uses a 3D video camera to scan an area in three dimensions. How it does this is similar to the way humans have depth perception; using two points of reference set apart by a small gap. Its state of the art optics and processing capabilities will make for a smooth and responsive gaming. They’re also adding something incredible, artificial intelligence.

The part of Natal that players see looks like a webcam. But it’s the software inside, which Microsoft calls “the brain,” that processes the images taken by the camera. It’s been programmed to look at images, look for a human shape, and identify about 30 parts, like your head, torso, hips, knees, elbows, and thighs.

In programming this brain, something they’re still doing, Microsoft relies on an “advancing field” of artificial intelligence called machine learning. The idea is this: feed the computer enough data—in this case, millions of images of people—and it can learn by itself how to understand it. That saves programmers the impossible task of coding rules that describe all the trillions of movements a human body can make.

It’s a lot like a mom pointing to many different children’s hands and saying “hand,” until a baby figures out what hands looks like, how they can move, and that they don’t vanish into thin air when they’re momentarily out of sight.

Microsoft announced that Project Natal is scheduled to be sold in stores by the holiday season. Along with Natal, Microsoft will also be releasing a new Xbox 360 console. The console will have newer, more efficient elements that will smooth out the already pretty seamless video-gaming that Microsoft provides.