From The Other Side of the 360’s Live Vision Camera Lens

By way of Gamasutra and Xbox-Scene comes a brief e-mail chat with Chief Technology Officer and GestureTek co-founder Francis MacDougall. GestureTek, you say? They’re the firm behind the Xbox 360’s Live Vision Camera and its fancy motion tracking and face capturing technology.

What does the Xbox camera offer over something like EyeToy?

The frame rate is a big plus for rapid interaction, while the resolution is a plus for face tracking and other applications.

What can GestureTek offer to developers and publishers to make working with the camera easier?

Through our deal with Microsoft, we have provided a basic library of functions for initializing and allowing basic interaction with onscreen objects. In addition, as a third party tools provider, we are providing an advanced set of tracking libraries including our face tracker and motion libraries. These are thoroughly tested algorithms that are optimized for the Xbox 360 platform, and are designed to be dropped onto a specific thread to run in the background.

Why do you think we rarely seen console based cameras viewed as anything more than novelties in the past, and what role do you think the Xbox 360 camera will fill?

The style of interactions that have been put into the games, and the lack of variety have been the biggest problems to date. All of the games so far have used simple control models like “wipes” and “touches”. Better tracking models will generate better games. The Xbox 360 camera is being marketed first as a communication and entertainment device, and second as a game control device.

I think this is a great approach. The goal is to get the attachment rate of the camera to the console to be as high as possible, and this will be facilitated by adding more reasons for people to purchase the camera. Applications like video conferencing, cool video dance effects, and intelligent home workout software will help to broaden its use. With that kind of penetration, the larger game makers will take the effort to integrate it more broadly into their game offerings.

While the “attachment rate” may be growing by way of video chats and real-time poker faces I just don’t see the Vision Camera having much more of an effect on gaming than Sony’s Eye Toy. Hell, Sony Europe has a whole division dedicated to their camera and they have yet to get gamers (and non-gamers) off their couches.

But I remain hopeful. Something like Logitech’s video avatars could be a great hook while Microsoft Games Studio cooks up a unique title. And with Wii and PS3 sporting motion sensing controls Microsoft will need all the pointy prongs of fancy technology they can get to cast into the sea of consumers in 2007.

And because I’ve been waiting oh-so-impatiently to finally use our fancy new YouTube feature, here’s a hilariously subdued demonstration of Logitech’s latest webcam stuff.