Head-tracking via Kinect was announced for Forza 4 a while back, but a new video featuring Major Nelson shows just how it will work.
Speaking from a personal viewpoint I’m not overly keen on head-tracking in racing games, and it certainly didn’t float my boat in GT5.
What do you think?
Source: YouTube
Tuffcub
What you can’t see is that Milo is on the back seat, begging you to play with him, pleading with his cold, dead eyes. He wants to be your friend, please be his friend. If you don’t then he’s going to take the piano wire he’s hidden in his satchel and garrote you while you drive..
Awayze
Kinda lame. PS Eye can do that. I dont turn my head away from my TV when playing a game. I’ll wait for a price drop before buying.
hazelam
there’s one problem i always see with head tracking like that, you turn your head and you’re not looking at the screen anymore.
you turn your head then you have to look out the corner of your eye at the screen.
that hardly seems like it would improve immersion to me.
tie head tracking to a head mounted display though, then you’d be onto a winner.
JesseDeya
I’m actually surprised how little lag there is in this demo, I was expecting far worse… still, it’s a MS PR piece and Nelson’s lips were moving so there is bound to be a lie in there somewhere. ;)
I’ve been a huge fan of head tracking for years (TrackIR for PC), but ONLY for Flight Sims. I find head tracking with driving games really off putting. The problem is that unlike flying, driving is a twitch sport requiring constant adjustment based on the way the car is moving underneath you. On a computer/console you naturally don’t have the use of proprioceptors, so your only reference to what the car is doing is to watch the screen for how the movement of the outside environment is changing from one split second to the next. It’s a process out brain does automatically and it’s what helps us pick up things like an oversteer slide and correct it before there are any other obvious clues the car is sliding.
When your view is ‘floating’ as it is with head tracking, you lose a LOT of those subtle visual clues that tell you what the car is doing as they get masked and confused with the natural motion of your head. The only real way around this is to have a very large deadzone associated with the head tracking such that the normal movements of your head aren’t tracked, and only extreme/obvious head turns register. Having played with all manor of configurations, I could never find something that felt right.
Foxhound_Solid
Aas always with Microsoft. Copy and paste. No thanks, ms.
fattyuk
So how does this advance gameplay? And can’t the ps eye already do this well anyway?
Sorry microsoft but epic fail for me! I kinda wanna an excuse to buy an xbox or even kinect but so far there’s nothing interesting hopefully e3 could come up trumps