Four meters for Natal. MS screwed up again?

[Pulsar_t]

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/natal ... s-of-space

If you have 4 meters of spare space you're probably too rich to be playing games anyway. This rules out much of the European and Japanese markets, and a good chunk of the NA one. What were they thinking? I'm certain a revised PR statement is being prepared as we speak.

[Jerkface Killah]

I really hope they meant "up to" 4 meters, and not "at least". Maybe my parents house has that much free space, but not my 1 bedroom apartment.

JFK

[Pulsar_t]

If Natal is to succeed the recommended range should be 1.5-2m, not 4m.

[t0yrobo]

I have a feeling 4m is the maximum distance that the sensors can work with. Not the minimum required for it to work right. MS does some stupid stuff now and then, but not that bad.

[MrPopo]

"To be precise, you'll want to clear an area extending at least 4 meters (a little more than 13 feet) away from the television. That's the back edge of the space to be taken into account by the Natal sensors," Techflash reports.

It sounds like 4 meters is the max but that they expect games to use the entirety of the space. With the Wii there's the min and max distances for resolution of the pointer but the actual movement of the Wiimote (in pointer mode) ends up being on the order of inches. With this it sounds more like they are expecting you to move forward and back, so it sounds like you will need the 4 meters.

[J T]

The PS2 Eye Toy required a fair amount of distance for some of their games, but they also had a lens you could put on the eye toy which kind of cut down on the need for lots of space. I play my Eye Toy pretty close to the screen. Sometimes it loses track of me, but it works ok for the most part. It's just annoying when you're really pushing for some good race times in Anti-Grav and you suddenly lose your stride because of a technical malfunction, especially since you have to win 3 races in a row to progress and your arms can get pretty tired from having to hold them out to the side the whole time.

[env963]

Ive seen some of the youtube videos on Natal, and at least for me, it doesn't impress me one bit. Am i alone on this statement?

[Niode]

4 metres? Holy shit. I have 2.5-3 metres from the screen to my couch with a coffee table in the middle. Playing Eyepet on PS3 is a major pain in the arse because we have to move the other couch (I have 2 couches at right angles to each other around the TV) all the way to the other side of the room and push the coffee table right up just to have enough floor space to play the game. We tried to play it on the coffee table but it kept having issues with tracking.

I wasn't planning on buying Natal due to it's similarities with the PS Eye, it didn't really seem worth it and the lag sounds pretty bad (around 300-400ms which they promise to make faster but honestly, I don't really know how they'll do it since they've offloaded the processing to CPU, Natal is simply 2 USB cameras, no extra hardware anymore) Even the Move seems to have very noticeable lag at around 200ms... Imagine double that.

[Flake]

And this never came up in any of Microsoft's development meetings because...?

Surely you think that at some point an employee would raise their hand and say 'umm...so I had a thought about the living areas of about 90% of the people we're trying to market this to.'