Natal to use 10-15% of 360's resources

Can recognise any pose in just 10 milliseconds.

According to a New Scientist report, Microsoft's Project Natal will utilise approximately 10-15 per cent of the Xbox 360's computing resources. The figure comes from Natal's lead developer Alex Kipman.

"Natal has to work on the existing hardware without taking too much hardware processing away from the games developers," explained Kipman.

Given the massive processing power motion capture usually requires, the technology had to be stripped down to a 50MB software package that can recognise 31 different body parts in any video frame. It can recognise any pose in just 10 milliseconds.

"When we train this 'brain' we are telling it: this is the head, this is the shoulder. And we're doing that over millions of frames," said Kipman. "When it sees a new image it can tell you the probability it's seeing a certain body part based on that historical information."

Kipman continued: "It correctly positions your hand even if it's held behind your back. It knows the hand can only be in one place."

Earlier this week Project Natal was confirmed for release in holiday 2010.