Natal Might Have Lag and Control Issues

2010 is set to be a year dominated by a battle between Project Natal and the Sony wand, as Microsoft and Sony will battle in motion control solutions as they try to take away one of the competitive advantages of the Nintendo Wii. And it seems that the Natal concept might still have some issues, even if final versions of the device are not yet available to developers, which might explain why the Japanese company’s gadget has a release date for late spring, while Microsoft is not talking about when it will put out its own motion controller.

Jon Burton, games director at Traveller's Tales, told Develop magazine that “I was actually more impressed with Sony’s motion capture solution than Microsoft’s Natal,” adding that the Microsoft project is “exceedingly clever, but the lag on the input and lack of physical buttons is really going to restrict the kind of games that can be done with it.”

Meanwhile, the Sony wand, which was at one point called Gem but is still waiting for an official name, is “cheap, accurate and will put buttons at your fingertips, meaning everything from action adventures to FPSes can be handled with the same input.”

Project Natal is the more ambitious of the concepts, eliminating any physical controller and relying on a high-end camera and proprietary software to actually follow a player as they move about the environment and translate that into actual input. The Sony wand is based upon a handheld peripheral tracked by a camera that turns its position into input but it also has buttons, which allow for some actions to be performed.

At the moment, videogame publishers have not confirmed the games that will arrive for the two new devices with just Ubisoft saying that it plans to offer more titles for Natal than for the Sony solution.