Nintendo said Ninten-no to Project Natal in 2007?
By Vlad Savov 
posted January 28th 2010 7:19AM
posted January 28th 2010 7:19AM
posted January 28th 2010 7:19AM
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I told everybody that a Mocap system is a hell of expensive.
For example, a Mocap system that do only half of the Natal promised feature can cost over $30k green ($30.000).
@magallanes super small nitche market crap is always astronomically overpriced! Especially if they have film makers and game developers with lots of $ as their customers.... Motion Capture is also old so it was costly to develop back when the hardware was more limited then people in the special Olympics.
@magallanes ive been able to do motion capture with After Effects and some Ping Pong balls...now what?
@SirNoDroin And a fully copy of After Effects run's $1000, and you can only do motion capture, and probably with quite a bit of input from you. Natal not only "captures motion", but is supposed to decipher and understand what the motions mean, as well as do voice recognition and recognize physical objects. All using the built in software. And it's apparently supposed to be cheap enough for a casual consumer to want to buy. I think that's what @magallanes was trying to get at.
Natal is a lot more than 'just' a 3D camera like 3DV was selling. The body tracking routines, the facial recognition, everything. Maybe 3DV was trying to sell their 3D camera to Nintendo, but that's hardly the same thing as selling Natal.
And Nintendo's console hardware is weak (wii-K) enough----- and the iPod Touch smokes their little DS Hardware! You know who really likes the Wii, little girls and soccer moms; any real engadget people rock a 360 or PS3.... and from the posts it sounds like most people have uber high end PC/ Mac hardware too.
Nintendo is behind the times; no wonder they turned down something innovated!
@cosmicinglewood
U are right. But we all grew up with Nintendo we don't want them to fail. Microsoft is like the big brother and Nintendo is the little brother. I don't like Sony that's just my opinion. I'm afraid the only way Nintendo can bring tough competition of they loose their "baby" name. Unfortunatly I don't see that day coming. I have an Xbox 360 and a wii guess which is used more.
@cosmicinglewood
I like my Tatsunoko vs Capcom, No More Heroes 2 and Mad World.
But you know. I love soccer moms too.
@Troyb0y29 - The little brother? Oh how quickly we forget that Nintendo had the most draconian licensing over games in the 80's. They rose from the ashes of the big games crash of '84 to become the front runners in home gaming.
They even had enough power to bar developers from working on titles for competing platforms, otherwise they lost the license to code games for the NES.
Nintendo was so intrinsically linked to video gaming that playing games was often referred to as 'playing nintendo' (cringe). Sega were the underdogs of the day.
@cosmicinglewood people play games on Macs?
@cosmicinglewood Yeah.
Those XSUX DEEP SHITTYs and GAY MUTATION FREEs of yours just suck. Wait until the world wants a better video gaming experience.
The DEEP SHITTY just has one button so all you can play is Onekey by Nitrome, and you can't if there's no wireless connection. Plus, the media playback sucks. You can only play randomly selected videos and music (plus slideshows) by pressing the button three times in three seconds.
The GAY MUTATION FREE is Soapy's free console geared towards gay people looking for Free! It does all types of gay stuff like making men kiss each other.
On the other hand, Wii is a simple gaming experience, damning those who get in the way. Look at wii.com for more info.
Didn't they buy 3DV Systems to nail down overlapping patents?
I was under the impression Natal was developed by MSR?
Wiimote says " pew pew pew "
@7egend wiimote looks like a vibrator designed by a space alien!
maybe nintendo knew that their hardware wouldn't be capable of running the software due to lack of processing power.
@(Unverified) Nindingo's hardware would probably run the Iphone OS 2.0 choppy LOL It looks like they went back to 1995 for the GPU in the Wii....
@cosmicinglewood cant help but be reminded of windows 3.1 by the Wii's user interface....
@cosmicinglewood they probably do all the game testing on hand-me4own sony CRT tv's. Lol. And nah iphone is more capable than wii. Apple motion recognition controller for ipad next year. ;)
Way to go Nintendo. You could've had *actually* physically interactive games. Instead, you gave us... "waggle."
Once Natal and the Motion controller for the PS3 come out, the Wii is going to be relegated to SNL skits.
@Dreamscape86
Don't you see? Nintendo has fooled the entire market. MS and Sony had to play catch up, and by the time they do, the new Wii will be released.
Going from worst to first in 6 years is nothing to guffaw about. Now if Nintendo were really looking to change the game again, they'd go back to normal controllers next gen while MS and Sony try and catch up with motion control. That would be funny.
@Moonchild
Does that mean the Wii2 will have games that are fun to play?
@Dreamscape86
idk what ur talking about snl is prettty funny. The ps3 wand looks like a copy of the wii with a camera. Natal does look cool though
@Dreamscape86
Typical response from a wii-less one.
@Moonchild Owned a Wii, hated it. I Agree with OP
@SirNoDroin
To say there are no fun games for the Wii is quite an exaggeration. Don't care if you owned one or not. I own a PS3 and a Wii. The Wii gets far more playing time when friends are over, and the P3 is my lone wolf mcquade console.
@Dreamscape86
And your point...
You don't seem friendly. Once, my cousin had to ship his 360 back to Microsoft HQ to get it fixed.
Oh and the Red Ring of Murder will murder your Natal experience. If you do need to use Natal, go to Brazil.
Like others have said, if it uses 10% of the 360's processing power (which MS did in order to be able to offer it at an affordable price rather than including hardware in the device), that's basically all of the Wii. (Seriously - yes I own a Wii and not a 360, and the CPU power difference is in that range.)
It looks like MS made the same decision Nintendo did about the hardware being too expensive, but because their system has spare CPU power, they were able to cut costs by reducing the hardware required for the add-on.
Yeah I don't understand the statement or logic behind "3DV Systems was fully responsible for Natal" as purported by Vladislav. That would assume that Microsoft didn't pour a shitload of money and R&D into Natal, which I'm sure they have.
You can't exactly take a third-party hardware system and simply plug it into the Xbox and assume it'll work...
Who down ranked my comments if everyone on here seems to agree the the Wii is way underpowered? - that is all I was saying!
@cosmicinglewood I agree. I guess we can't mak jokes while we are also making a valid point. And no I wasn't trying to make fun of the ipad, so apple fanboys can rest easy. Look at my comment history and ull see i'm not an apple hater or fanboy of any kind. Thanks.
@cosmicinglewood
Well probably because you're stating the obvious. That's like bashing the 360 because it doesn't have motion controls. It's stupid.
Besides that, you're talking about the iPhone, which is a horrible gaming platform. Yeah it's more powerful than the DS. The Atari Jaguar was more powerful than the SNES.
@BigKing nobody said the iphone was a good gaming platform. Anything that is touch screen only is halfway-decent at best as a gaming platform. It was a simple comparison of processing power from a non-technical standpoint. @cosmicinglewood I guess we got flamed for saying iphone. Oops i'm gonna get downranked into oblivion for saying it again.
it wont be that responsive either
I read the CVG article several times and I don't understand where they're getting their over-simplified conclusion. 3DV Systems was working on a time-of-flight camera called the ZCam they were going to market for around 100 dollars. There is a time-of-flight camera that is core to the Natal device, so Microsoft bought the ZCam to take their product from have competition. According to Johnny Lee, MS has been working on Natal for 10 years, and that's not impossible because a depth camera (time-of-flight) is not a new technology. Even if the ZCam is the basis for the cheap depth camera in Natal, what CVS is saying is erroneous. It's clear to me that this insider simply minced words.
Of course Iwata is worried about latency. The Wii specs are shiite compared to XBox 360. Nintendo is also rarely innovative. Who has a game machine in 2010 that's not capable of HD?? C'mon, get real Nintendo.
@Modiggy: How can you say Nintendo is rarely innovative. Probably the dumbest statement I have heard all day. Seriously.
@Modiggy
Yeah, "rarely innovate" says the guy holding a controller in his hand basically ripped from the Nintendo template from 25 years ago....
@Modiggy OK OK guys I'll agree the WiiMote is fairly innovative so I'll take my lumps there. I guess I'm still just bewildered by Nintendo's lack of interest in supporting HD. I mean even 720p for heavens sake would be a nice improvement! And I think the xBox controller is a little bit nicer than the original NES controller but that's just me ;)
I have grown up with nintindo and I think their mobile platform was an innovative design but now the wii hasn't impressed me at all mabey natal couldve been their next impressment but they turned it down that's why I am still attached to my xbox 360.
Awkwardness at house parties has been around as long as house parties have been around.
Natal was 100% developed by Microsoft.. not to sure why he would make those claims.
Well, 3 years ago it WAS too expensive. I really doubt they're regretting the decision, as they continue to rake in money from the Wii.
I'm still a Nintendo fan and will probably always be a Nintendo fan. However, I think they are patting themselves on the back with the Wii too much and aren't concerned with the future of gaming.
Eventually, there will be no consoles. Everything will be via the internet. And I don't think it will be "OnLive," which is a good idea, but Microsoft and Sony will pounce on that idea (and they probably have a bigger research, development and marketing budget).
I heard that the iPad passed up Project Natal first, back in 2006. Perhaps you should issue a corrective article about that.
Yeah, I hate things like Natal.
I think the point is Microsoft have brought it along quite a bit, remember voice recognition is developed at Remond for Windows so combine it with 3DV's tech, plus add all Microsoft's own motion capture research and you have Project Natal.
It's something Nintendo can ignore but not something Microsoft could, Xbox will test and develop this tech to perfection, then Windows 8 will be watching from your webcam.
Microsoft probably bought Natal and then made some modifications so it's possible that MS is partially responsible for creating Natal even if they were not it's progenitor.