I’m Not Johnny Lee!
by john on Jun.12, 2009, under Head Tracking, wiimote
Despite what Engadget might say, I am not Johnny Lee. In fact, I am John Harrison. While my wiiMote experiments were inspired by Johnny Lee, they are my own creation. I’ve see his YouTube videos, read some of his blog posts and that’s it. I have not read any of his source code or even implemented the same demos as him. My FPS demo is my own creation, and the interaction, while inspired by Johnny’s stuff, is different and my own design.
I do think it is interesting that Johnny has been hired by Microsoft and I’m sure he’ll continue to innovate there. I don’t think that the home-brew community will have as much interest given that it seems unlike that MS will create a device (and software in this case) that is as open as the wiiMote.
I think project Natal (I speak Portuguese, so Merry Christmas!) is a project with a lot of potential. That said, it is going to take a lot more work to innovate with it than it has taken Johnny with the wiiMote. The wiiMote is a relatively simple device, and for the most part Johnny has used it to track the relative locations of 2 (and sometimes up to 4) IR points in space. Generally this has been done in 2D, though there are tricks to determine 3D positioning from two points, and using two wiiMotes can give actual 3D location. In any case, there is a limited amount of data to keep track of and you know it with a great deal of precision without having to do very much processing at all.
Contrast this with Natal.
Using stereo pairs of webcams to generate 3D information is considerably more complex than what people are doing with wiiMotes. There is a great deal more processing, more noise to deal with, and presumably less precision. Plus, developers need to decide what to track, and what various gestures might mean, and then make them work for people of all body types, and deal with other people moving in the scene.
This might sound easy, and maybe it will all work, and MS will develop tools to make it easy for developers. My guess is that Natal will be a evolutionary step forward from things such as Eye Toy and other webcam based input systems. It will make for cool demos, but in practice will be frustrating and inconsistent.
I hope I’m wrong, and that it is revolutionary, precise, and consistent.
