Microsoft’s Project Natal Doesn’t Care About Black People?
by Latoya Peterson
I spent a lot of last week traveling and grinding on deadlines, so I missed most of the E3 coverage coming out of the gaming sphere. While I plan to catch up with BawdyJane on what she spotted there later, one project in particular caught my eye.
Dan Hsu over at BitMob has the goods:
During E3 2009, journalists, developers, and even Hollywood celebrities got wind of the secret demonstrations Microsoft was giving to select individuals and were pulling every string they could find to get in. Even Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto went to the secret area of Microsoft’s booth and got a private VIP demo.
Demian and I got to give Natal a go, and we came away extremely impressed…and neither of us are of the easily impressed variety….
“No matter how many buttons you put in a controller, you can’t get this kind of fidelity,” says Natal Creative Director Kudo Tsunoda. We’ll see later if gamers (especially the hardcore) even want that sort of fidelity, but what we’ve seen so far supports Tsunoda’s statement.
The device measures 48 different joints on your body, so it’s able to distinguish your hands from your forearm, your forearm from your upper arm, your upper arm from your torso, and so on. It can detect forward and backward 3D positioning as well, unlike old Vision Cam games that see your silhouette as a 2D physical object. It even knows how fast you’re moving your body parts toward or away from the television (keep the snickers down to a minimum, please).
Awww, yeah! Reminds me of what they were going for back in the day with those clunky virtual reality helmets everyone swore would be the new hotness. You can even use your feet to kick at things instead of keeping all your movement from the torso up, as indicated in the shot below:
Whoo! So I was properly geeked…until I caught this little note:
When game consultant and former Newsweek writer N’Gai Croal gave Paradise a test drive, however, the game had trouble reading his steering actions. The footwork (gas and brakes) worked fine, but Croal couldn’t steer his car at all. It wasn’t clear whether this was a problem of calibration differences between Tsunoda and Croal’s very different body types, or if Croal’s crazy dreadlocks threw Natal off. But it was working just fine when Tsunoda was at the “wheel.”
It’s not about the dreadlocks, Shoe. N’Gai is brown-skinned. Sensors did not compute. Damn it, gaming people. Race issues are harshin my squeez again.
Luckily, this was a technology issue and not a character or plot issue, so instead of denials, we actually got a swift statement back from Microsoft. Gamezine.co.uk reports:
Research into the issue resulted in a study concluding that near-infra-red cameras did indeed struggle to read movements from those with darker skin.
However, Microsoft has responded to these worries, telling Gamezine that all ethnicities will be able to use the technology.
“Last week at E3, we gave a taste of what to anticipate when Project Natal launches. As we mentioned to everyone who had the chance to play, we were working with tech demos and, as we all know, these can be temperamental,” Microsoft told Gamezine.
“The goal of Project Natal is to break down the barriers for everyone to play, and it will obviously work with people of all shapes and ethnicities at launch.”
So hooray for Microsoft. They are handling the situation and should have it fixed before Project Natal hits a store near you. And, as another thing in favor of Microsoft, it appears that N’Gai’s copy could have had a glitch. Other folks with dark skin (like Sugar Ray Leonard) tested the game and appeared to be able to participate just fine:
However, the whole situation got me thinking about the assumptions inherent in gaming, particularly within character design and applications.
Page 1 of 3 | Next page