Microsoft's "Project Natal" Secrets Revealed

Financial Times' Chris Nuttall reveals Natal plans. Microsoft's Natal gesture interface might or might not be the next big market for image sensors, as it's promised to become the universal "remote control" for everything: game consoles, TVs, monitors, media centers, mobile phones and what's not.

Smell of the big new market attracted many companies. One of them is Silicon Valley software startup GestureTek - FT's information source for the article. Francis MacDougall, GestureTek CTO, sheds some light on the Microsoft plans on Natal's 3D sensors:

“Microsoft chose to purchase 3DV because it had an interesting set of patents on the hardware side and they chose Prime Sense as a supplier because their technology is going to get to the market in one year, whereas 3DV is more like two to three years.”

Primesense is said to use CMOS sensor and put an infra-red bar code out into the room allowing a second camera to detect the spaces between the lines of the barcode, determining how far away each part of the image is. By barcode FT probably means structured light.

So, it looks like Primesense technology is used now, while 3DV time-of-flight is the future direction. And Canesta is another time-of-flight contender. FT says that no one expects to see the Project Natal product on sale to consumers until the holiday season of 2010.