Kinect Tech Not Limited To 2 Players

Overnight, stories surfaced regarding comments made by Primesense to Joystiq that suggested Kinect, Microsoft’s final name for Project Natal, was limited to two controlling players.  Apparently, although Kinect can “see” any number of players, rumours abound a few hours ago that the motion controller could only manage to ‘track’ two players.

Speaking to Primesense this morning, we can confirm that the technology behind Microsoft’s motion control has no such limitations.  A rep from Primesense told TheSixthAxis that their solution has no limit on the number of players it can track, although they couldn’t comment on any other implementation of the software, such as that used in Kinect.

So, whilst Primesense’s solution appears to be without any hard limits, it’s still currently ambiguous whether or not Kinect itself can track more than 2 players.

This post has been updated for clarification regarding Kinect and Primesense.

21 Comments

  1. You know two players is alight… gives the other people time to cool down and lower there heart rates lol.

  2. Ah, last night was just a dream..

  3. Now the real issue is finding 4 players who WANT to play it!

    • ohhhh nail head hit i think YOU have a point there….

    • my thoughts exactly, I don’t know if I’m that lonely :) or is it really hard to find 4 gamer at the same room willing to play the same game.
      That’s why I prefer online gaming, you just log in and play with 32 players anytime and the whole screen is yours.

    • Anyone…

    • I think the bigger issue is making sure each person has different colour tops and plain wall behind them! ;)

    • now we need just to buy a new xbox and 2 kinects. Then we can play with kinect while we are playing with kinect :D

  4. As if I would care family gaming is a disturbance to me

  5. Can 4 players play without hurting each other?

  6. 4popl at the same time is to much it was hard when you played eye toy with 3other at the same tim and it will be the same with kinect.

  7. So you just delete the old article in toto? What?

    There is actually still no evidence to prove that is DOES work with more than two players. Has anyone seen ANY footage (demos, not lifestyle videos or staged bollocks) of it tracking more than two people?

    Nofi in your original article you said yourself “It’s worth mentioning that Primesense only licensed the tech to Microsoft and the Primesense rep was talking about the in-camera chip that Microsoft did away with and moved to software, so some improvements might have been made internally since (and there’s still plenty of time before launch).”

    Does the Primesense rep know _absolutely_ that MS have been able to overcome that limitation? To quote the Joystiq article “Unfortunately, company reps weren’t able to comment on specifics of the licensing deal, and were very quick to point out that much of what has been done so far with Kinect is Microsoft’s own software”.

    Then there is the whole Zumba thing: “Players can also grow that party at home with up to four players on Wii and PlayStation Move, and up to two players on Kinect for Xbox 360.”

    As for your closing comment – I’d argue from what I’ve seen it can’t even track _one_ person ‘no problem’. What gives with the complete 180 nofi? Did they threaten you? Just tell me and I swear I’ll make those bullies pay!! ;-)

    • Good points made fairly well.
      It still stands that some games are 4P on both Wii and PS3, but 2P on Kinect..

      And if it’s a software limitation, that’s about the same a limitation as running games at 720p instead of 1080p. 1080p needs a lot more processing power, in general, or you need to build from the ground up to get 1080p and really slog to optimise for it. But that doesn’t mean that 1080p will work for every game, because it still takes a huge amount of processing power.

      Do you see? So Kinect my not be limited to 2 players, but it may well struggle to handle more than 2…

      • If Kinect is working hard for one or two players, doesn’t it stand to reason that it’s going to be really, really laggy with four players? Just thinking aloud.

  8. Why does it sound like Microsoft were holding a gun to your head when you wrote this?

  9. 4 people in the same room in front on a tele, moving ….. does not sound good

    • lol sorry for saying almost the samething you said… I didn’t read all the commments before posting. Great minds…

  10. 4 People dancing around in a living room…sounds like an accident waiting to happen.

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