ESPN has a great article on the phenomenon known as Madden Football–along the way, the game helped shape the entire industry.
Wow, Google is making a big move into the social gaming space with it’s investment in Zynga. One wonders if Zynga might consider broadening it’s horizons beyond Facebook? Of course, Google has yet to get it’s facebook competitor off the ground.
http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/10/google-secretly-invested-100-million-in-zynga-preparing-to-launch-google-games/?goback=.gde_138591_member_24632691
New software, developed by Xiaolin Wei and Jinxiang Chai of Texas A&M University in College Station, tracks humans in video footage, and creates 3D models of them. This new technology is expected to bring motion capture to the masses without the need for high-end equipment.
(Via Animated 3D models extracted from single-camera video – tech – 10 July 2010 – New Scientist.)
A professor at University of Essex compared physical ability of gamers with atheletes. I agree with much of the article feedback, the researcher picked an extreme example (10 hour/day gamer) to conclude they have the fitness level of a 60 year old smoker. The good news, his extreme gamer candidates are happy and have great reaction times.
Here is the the Telegraph article.
As a way to promote the Steam platform for the Mac, Valve is giving away the popular 3D puzzle game, Portal, until May 24.
So hop over to the Steam web site and download without delay. I never played it before. It has an interesting game mechanic with nice graphics for the era in which it was developed.
Slashdot reports that George Mason University’s game development BS degree enrollment is going gang busters. They expected 30 enrollees and got 200! The school’s new bachelor’s degree in video game design is the only 4 year program in the DC area.
NeuroSky has released dry sensor ECG headset geared toward gamers. These have been announced for some time, but it’s the first time I’ve played with them. The idea is to record brain activity when the player is in the “zone” and then use biofeedback to assist the player to get BACK into the “zone”. One group at their GDC booth was collecting data on player concentration/interest via a puzzle game. With a large enough dataset, this will be a breakthrough to measure user interest during game testing. It’s quite a leap to suggest ECG patterns would be similar enough between people to assess interest, boredom, etc. But if they are successful, it would be a boon for game testing and hopefully produce more engaging titles.
OnLive brings cloud computing to gaming. While it was great to finally hear of a launch date, I was disappointed they didn’t provide a live demonstration at GDC. For those who aren’t familiar, OnLive will charge gamers a monthly subscription fee for access to their “cloud” of PC hosted games. Then users purchase access to games they want to play. The advantage is that they access high end gaming systems using any Mac, PC, or TV (small set top box processes IO).
OnLive also promotes the social aspects of gaming on their system: being able to watch friends live game feeds, easily share brag videos, and gain notoriety via viral brag video voting, etc. If offers developers the ability to bypass a publisher, eliminate theft and resales, and deliver/test on only 1 SKU. It will be an awesome beta platform since a community of testers is readily accessible, you don’t have to push out updates, and you can record all game play sessions.
If OnLive’s promises of low latency, high performance video streams can be consistently met, then it should be a great hit! Our challenge is that they have no plans to support educational gaming, only high cost AAA titles. “Maybe next year” they said.
Parrot’s AR Drone brings flying games to the real world! This automated 4 blade helicopter sports a camera and WiFi hotspot. The player connects over WiFi using an iPhone app and watches a live video feed on the phone. The software then looks for paper tags (other Drones or static markers) in the real world to engage in battle. Space ships and robots are overlaid on these “tags” in the live video feed, thus creating the augmented reality. The player can launch missiles to shoot down intruders. The stabilization software is quite good, making the AR Drone easy to fly. Remote control helis are notoriously difficult to control, but they appear to have worked out all of the bugs! The control mechanism will take some getting used to since it uses the iPhone’s tilt mechanism as a bi-directional input for each axis. The axis is selected by pressing a button on the screen.
- No ETA on pricing or delivery dates.
- They claim the inability to carry payloads (darn, no nerf launcher), but imagine the advertising opportunities.
- Flight time is limited to 15min, but rechargable batteries are quickly replaced.
- They claim no military applications, but if I was doing house to house searches I’d want one. It’s not very quiet, but most of the time bad guys know you’re in the house anyway.
While the gaming aspects of this are interesting, I think it’ll end up being used for surveillance a lot more than gaming. Coming soon to a curious 13 year old in your neighborhood!
Of course there is lots of media coverage of Sony’s new controller announcement at the Game Developers Conference. What’s interesting is their ability to detect precise push/pull and rotation maneuvers. A camera is used in addition to gyros, so augmented reality games are possible. Some of the games being demoed were tennis racket style games (swat the bugs, bounce birds into a nest, etc.) where the player is superimposed behind a virtual racket in the game. Another interesting game (although not AR) used both controllers in a gladiator style contest. The player uses one controller for a shield and the other for a sword. Fidelity between controller and game play looked a big disconnected, but not unexpected for a prototype game.
Below is a picture of the microphone shaped controllers being demoed on the GDC show floor.
