Video shows Natal recognizing gender

Thursday, 15th April 2010 19:15 GMT By Stephany Nunneley



It’s posted below the break.

Looks like Natal uses facial recognition to determine your gender, and shows your body on screen as it’s scanned, which looks similar to what some airports use to determine if you are smuggling parrots in your pants or not.

It also looks a bit predator-ish and not very laggy either.

There’s more there too. Watch it below.

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  1. Goliath

    For all the tech in Natal, how reasonably priced could it really be? And I’m still no sure how exactly in works with core games.

    #1 4 years ago
  2. FeaturePreacher

    Pretty neat. Wish they’d show if it could recognize spinning.

    #2 4 years ago
  3. FeaturePreacher


    What about rts?

    #3 4 years ago
  4. justiceblob

    Like the article says, I think the biggest thing to draw from this is that it’s no were near as laggy as we thought.

    #4 4 years ago
  5. Redh3lix

    uh… it’s not laggy because it’s rendering very little indeed regarding graphics?

    #5 4 years ago
  6. justiceblob

    True, but that shouldnt affect it too much….. especially as most of the shovelware for it will be of a very low standard of graphics

    #6 4 years ago
  7. 2plus2equals5

    i have noticed that distant people is not considered

    #7 4 years ago
  8. Boris Fett


    That’s like saying the input between a controller and what you see on screen would be reduced if a game has better graphics. It’s not.

    As long as a game is designed properly, there won’t be any noticeable lag.

    #8 4 years ago
  9. Benjo1981


    Is that a bad thing?

    #9 4 years ago
  10. Hollie35Ochoa

    Some time ago, I did need to buy a building for my firm but I did not have enough cash and couldn’t order something. Thank God my comrade proposed to try to get the home loans at reliable bank. So, I acted that and used to be happy with my small business loan.

    #10 4 years ago
  11. ww3pl

    Imagine a sad, nerdy person who’s standing by the console.

    He’s starting up his NATAL thingy, and then he hears “Oh, good, we have a little gamer girl here!”

    This will happen, you know?

    This has to happen.

    #11 4 years ago
  12. Benjo1981

    I don’t think we can infer a great deal from this apart from the fact that it can distinguish between gender. Until we see some substantive software (rather than proof of concept stuff) and/or applications, wild speculation moves us no closer to understanding where Natal’s real value lies.

    #12 4 years ago
  13. 2plus2equals5

    @9:probably not, but now we know that distance is important.

    #13 4 years ago
  14. Benjo1981

    Didn’t we know that already? I doubt anybody thought Natal could detect the whole room/gaming space, so it was safe to assume that the area of detection was/is finite.

    Presumably, it’s a good thing that Natal has a maximum detection distance, because if not, it would detect people entering and leaving the room/gaming space…which would be very disruptive.

    #14 4 years ago
  15. DeSpiritusBellum

    @1 I don’t know, I think they set a pricepoint? But I agree, a sensor like that is heavy stuff, and all these motion gadgets don’t really strike me as overly intuitive, just novel and fun. Which is what they want to poke the Wii.

    @11 You’re gonna be calibrating it on start-up as far as I understand, so you’ll probably get to correct little mishaps like that if you’re a pretty boy.

    #15 4 years ago
  16. psxman

    I get the feeling there’ll be a lot of insulted pre-pubescent boys and girls, unless the thing can count your ribs.

    #16 4 years ago
  17. JPickford

    There’s no way it can detect gender. Maybe it can recognise the faces of people who’ve previously entered their details (including gender).

    #17 4 years ago
  18. Aimless

    I don’t see why it wouldn’t be able to detect gender. Such functionality has already been demonstrated for the PSEye (skip to about 1:20) so I see no reason Natal wouldn’t be just as capable.

    The real question is one of reliability rather than possibility; who knows how readily such libraries can deal with a worldwide audience of varied ethnicities.

    #18 4 years ago
  19. JPickford

    That PSeye demo is taking a *guess* with a quite close up image.

    The Natal demo isn’t nearly so close up. We know Natal has face recognition – that’s all it needs anyway. Why would they need to build in super advance gender spotting AI? How would that benefit anybody (even if it was technically possible). If the accuracy is less than 100% you’ll end up offending lots of people. All that’s going on in that Natal demo is face recognition.

    #19 4 years ago
  20. Aimless

    All facial recognition is a “guess”. Hell, sometimes my stab at a person’s gender is pure guesswork!

    Given Natal’s depth perception it’s fair to assume it stands a better chance of gauging someone’s gender than the PSEye. You have obvious bodily differences such as breasts, but there’s also things such as arm length, tapering of the thighs, or waist and hip size. None of those things on their own are definitive, but combined they can give the hardware a good idea of the sex of the user. If it isn’t sure it could simply not automatically ascribe a gender and prompt the player instead. Or just take a stab at it anyway, perhaps shaming the fattie into exercising.

    As for your question of who would benefit even if the feature is technically possible… to be honest that goes for Natal as a whole as far as I’m concerned. I’m just challenging your “no way”.

    #20 4 years ago
  21. frostquake

    Only Those with REALLY LONG PENISESESES and HUGE TA TA’s will be gender recognized…oh wait that was a Donkey Show I saw in Mexico..ROFL

    #21 4 years ago