on' with Microsoft's upcoming Xbox 360 motion detection gizmo? Impossible, since your hands touch nothing, nor your arms, elbows, legs, knees, or feet. Still, Project Natal, as the mechanism is called, can reportedly do a full-body scan instantaneously as you approach its tube-like webcam, mapping your “arms and elbows, hips, legs and feet” and “replicating your entire body in an on-screen avatar,” according to Irish tech site Silicon Republic. How do they know? Because Microsoft demonstrated Natal to a handful of people in London this week, offering a chance to try out the dodgeball game demonstrated at last year's E3. Sadly that's all they demonstrated, but it gave skeptical gamers a chance to gauge the accuracy of the technology two quarters in advance of its planned 2010 holiday release. For starters, while Natal's camera can map an impressive array of spatial activity, it suffers from slight lag. The consensus seems to be that there is some delay, though there's disagreement about whether that spells trouble for the tech rolling forward. Kotaku's Brian Crecente is one who thinks there may be. Whether he's right or not, he makes the wrong analogy, comparing the input-response lag to the visuals-related “uncanny valley,” the sense of repulsion we seem to feel toward simulated humans as they approach high fidelity, presumably wiped clean only once they achieve perfect fidelity and become indistinguishable from the real McCoy. The analogy doesn't work for several reasons, among them the fact that we've yet to experience perfectly simulated humans, whereas we have experienced perfect motion control. But the bigger problem issue is that Crecente's analogy conflates something identification-based and indeterministic with something that's mechanics-driven and deterministic. Lag in a motion control interface doesn't function in terms of subjecive adjectives like “uncanny” or “believable,” but rather in terms of deterministic indices like “detectable” or “undetectable.” If lag is “detectable,” we register annoyance or frustration, not repulsion. Microsoft's challenge is no different than anyone else's in terms of control interfaces. They either eliminate the lag, or - if Natal isn't powerful enough to do so - work around it by avoiding games that demand ultra-precision timing. What's more, in games like that, your brain eventually compensates, and you tend to forget there's lag at all.
