When will we have Natal on PC?
by Persus-9 on Jun.06, 2009, under thoughts
It seems odd to me that for all the fuss that Project Natal, Microsoft’s new motion-video-voice controllerless controller has caused at this years E3 that not many people are talking about the potential of Project Natal for PC and asking Microsoft the big question: when if ever will Natal be supported on PC?
Joystiq reportedly asked and the answer they got was a non-committal “Of course, this has many applications”. The 2nd most interesting thing I’ve read that goes some way to helping speculate about this question is in Ellie Gibson’s interview with Alex Kipman over on Eurogamer, the top question on the 2nd page is “where does the magic happen?” and the answer is apparently: -
“So we have a custom chip that we put in the sensor itself. The chip we designed with Microsoft will be doing the majority of the processing for you, so as a game designer you can think about the sensor as a normal input device – something that’s relatively free for you as a game designer. Designers have 100 per cent of the resources of the console and this device is just another input device they can use.”
Now that’s big news for PC because if the clever stuff isn’t software based then that will seriously limit Microsoft’s options for keeping this peripheral limited to their favourite gaming platform. If from the consoles perspective it just looks like a webcam, microphone and 576 analogue controllers (it can reportedly handle 4 players with 48 points per player and 3 axis per point so 576) then it should be relatively easy for a PC to handle and if it’s possible then some PC genius will write an app to do it within the week.
Now I dare say Microsoft could deliberately make it very hard to get working on PC but why should they when they could just sell it? The PC is still largely their platform and Natal could be one heck of a selling point to get people to adopt Windows 7. Forget gaming applications, think of the office and media applications. Lots of people are still impressed by the Areo ‘Windows key + Tab’ browsing, so the potential to blow peoples minds by marketing the Windows 7 and Natal combination as introducing full on ‘Minority Report’ style hand gesture document manipulation and web browsing is huge. That’s the future right there. Take that Apple!
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Gates confirms Project Natal for PC - The New Flesh
July 15th, 2009 on 22:43[...] Bill Gates himself has said that they’re bringing Project Natal to PC and also to say that I called it. It may have been obvious, sure anyone with half a brain could have called it but guess who did [...]
July 18th, 2009 on 19:42
Natal connects to the Xbox 360 through a USB port so obviously it will work on a Windows computer. But would there be many takers?
July 18th, 2009 on 20:50
Got to disagree with you there, just because it’s USB doesn’t mean it’ll work with windows, pleanty of devices have USB connections but won’t talk to windows without a third party device driver or extra software.
If it’s not a standard input device then it’ll need it’s own device driver and if microsoft don’t release that device driver then it won’t work. Alternatively if the interpretation of the data coming from the two cameras was done by software on the xbox rather than firmware in the device and microsoft didn’t release that software for PC then it won’t work, the quote rules that out of course but the fact it connects via USB doesn’t automatically mean it’ll be windows compatible.
I can’t see why there wouldn’t be a lot of takers as well. After all the most rabid technophiles in the world own PCs and PC gamers are just as, if not more attracted to new shiny devices as anyone else. If Natal enabled software is released for PC then many PC gamers will want to have a go and since you can’t pirate physical objects that means sales.