Microsoft bought Natal. It was developed by 3DV systems.
And personally, I'm unconvinced that they've grasped what has made the Wii successful.
Case in point: the Wii remote, custom designed to be non-threatening, modelled after the familiar tv remote, allowing you to control the Wii with a few simple gestures and an on screen pointer. Natal, a mysterious camera that allows you to page through onscreen lists using some kind of semaphore system.
Microsoft thinks (or at least talks) like it's out Nintendo'd Nintendo with Natal but it all looks like cargo cult style mimicry to me. No different from offering family friendly card games that you need to control with something designed for Halo, just on the other side of the spectrum. Like goldilocks' and the three bears' porridge you can have both too much, and too little controller. The Wii seems to have got it just right.
Actually, Natal's AI is believed to have come from Peter Molyneux's Dimitri Project, which then turned into the full Milo project. Its motion capture, facial recognition and voice recognition, not to mention the microphone array helps perform acoustic source localization and ambient noise suppression, all of which was developed in-house at microsoft.
3DV was bought out in March 2009, Natal was shown fully functional and shipped to developers at E3 in June (actually 2nd-4th). So you're telling us in the space of maybe 2-3 months work Microsoft managed to make a fully functional Natal. Not to mention the system is entirely different. ZCam's sensing was an 8-bit 1/4-VGA , where as Natal's uses an infrared projector, tied with a monochrome CMOS sensor to allow it to work under any lighting condition (including no lighting) and allows it to sense at different ranges.
The differences are so huge in design it is impossible it was bought and demonstrated in the space of a couple of months.
I'm sorry, I don't buy it that microsoft bought Natal, there was simply too much work required to say they only had access to the ZCam after March 2009 and allowed people to actually play with Natal's demonstrations at E3.
This is inaccurate and based on speculation. We bought them long after the Natal project was underway. I would assume to protect ourselves from patent lawsuits.
And personally, I'm unconvinced that they've grasped what has made the Wii successful.
Case in point: the Wii remote, custom designed to be non-threatening, modelled after the familiar tv remote, allowing you to control the Wii with a few simple gestures and an on screen pointer. Natal, a mysterious camera that allows you to page through onscreen lists using some kind of semaphore system.
Microsoft thinks (or at least talks) like it's out Nintendo'd Nintendo with Natal but it all looks like cargo cult style mimicry to me. No different from offering family friendly card games that you need to control with something designed for Halo, just on the other side of the spectrum. Like goldilocks' and the three bears' porridge you can have both too much, and too little controller. The Wii seems to have got it just right.