Mobitrends

This was probably the most unexpected announcement last week at GDC, the huge annual gathering of the video games creators world. OnLive, an “under-the-radar” startup announced its game streaming platform which is basically composed by a little hdmi box connected to the TV and your home DSL/Cable box and connected to a huuuuge backed on state of the arts PCs running the games for you. Somehow, the game is being executed on the backend and the images are being pushed over the network to your TV.

Apparently the ones who were able to test-drive the solution on-site were amazed yet the technical constraints such as a ping to the servers below 20ms and an available bandwidth over 5Mb seem a bit hard to meet currently (sometimes even VoIP can’t make it on bad DSL lines…). I’m really wondering if the promise can be delivered or if it’s gonna be a tough fail for this company before the home broadband gets up to the level in the next 5 years. I’m especially curious as console manufacturers are already into digital content distribution and the gameplay being key here, even if the hardware is free if the user experience of the game is poor usual game console makers won’t have anything to fear.

MindArk, the editor of Entropia Universe just got a bank license in Sweden to enable them to provide real banking services around their virtual currency the PED (10PED = 1USD).
Last year 400M USD were exchanged in Entropia Universe and thus it’s interesting to see how a real banking system will perform in this virtual world enabling users to deposit their money to have it insured up to 60kUSD and earning benefits from it. A couple years ago such a system developed in Second Life out of individual initiatives and some of those went nuts with improbable interest rates and no real warranty at all for the customers.
Nevertheless this first experiment is certainly a milestone in the evolution of virtual worlds and if you’re interested in that theme you should definetly read “Halting state” by Charles Stross which pictures a robbery on a virtual bank held by a start-up focusing on providing banking services to virtual worlds. Pretty nice business model – would love to start one of those!

It’s all over the Internet since yesterday evening, so I thought it was about time I’d add my 2 cents to the rumbling of blog posts.

LaCie is primarily known for its USB storage disks (somehow design-ish), Wua.la is a p2p cloud storage system using either crowd storage or real datacenters to provide users with an online drive solution (such as me.com).

Somehow it seems like LaCie is starting to realize that as fiber connections (100Mb + high uplink) become slowly available, the essence of “saving” data might slip from hard drives to online backup solutions thus endangering their market position. Indeed, LaCie only design the electronics PCB between the sata hard drive and the USB port and the plastic box, the drive itself is just bought to third parties, and while drives are still needed to backup data their local presence might become obsolete within the next 5 years.
From that prospective going into cloud storage might sound smart, but I must confess I’m a bit disappointed by the choice of Wua.la.

We have been benchmarking their technology back in the days at WaveStorm (where we enable access to connected devices in a P2P way from any point on the Internet), and I must say I do not buy the vision of home computers always-on sharing their drives to secure their own datas.

The whole assertion sounds wrong when home computers become laptops are not always-on and have limited drive spaces mostly filled by HD videos and high-res pictures. Moreover the Java interface was so bulky in term of ergonomics (form a Mac user prospective at least) that it’s really hard to assume anyone non-geek is ever going to understand it.
Hopefully LaCie will reorient the technology and the vision in something both cash-generating and end-user oriented completing their product line with integrated smart services… wait and see… Anyway it can’t really harm more LaCie’s stock (see below).

That research dated from January 2008 definitely shows the path to where we’re heading with VR-WEAR,“Contact lenses with circuits, lights a possible platform for superhuman vision”

A few excerpts from the article:

Engineers at the University of Washington have for the first time used manufacturing techniques at microscopic scales to combine a flexible, biologically safe contact lens with an imprinted electronic circuit and lights.

The prototype device contains an electric circuit as well as red light-emitting diodes for a display, though it does not yet light up. The lenses were tested on rabbits for up to 20 minutes and the animals showed no adverse effects.

This is exactly the first step to “wearable computing” as described in Vernor Vinge’s “Rainbows end”

Fredcavazza had a demo of the HTC G2 this morning and did a couple of videos amongst which we can see the new streetview mode to be embedded in the next release of Android
Use of the gyroscope to move around the 3D rendering of the street is just stunning, can’t wait to get my G-Phone updated.

Update : My mistake it was already there ! just hidden in not-so-ergonomic menus…

This statement :

Virtual Reality is so 2008 – 2009 hype is Augmented Reality

sounds awfully wrong and yet it’s something I’m witnessing a lot lately, and I’m feeling uncomfortable about this.
I feel that this kind of hype is only dictated by communication agencies to have their clients make their way to the headlines. It has never had any real bound to the business side of the technology being used as hype vector.
For instance in 2006 there was a huge hype around Second Life and web3D but it’s only now that we start understanding how we can use this as a productivity tool and actually make money out of it in both business and personal use cases. Yet the hype created by the agencies has had a negative effect on the technology that has been soon perceived as outdated and useless.

The same thing is going on about Augmented Reality, it’s being pushed to create funky user interactions for brands and yet no real use case gets out of those trials. Even worse the whole creation chain of augmented reality content (i.e. stamping somehow real “things”, and associating them with 3D content) is far from being ready.

Somehow I feel like there are already so many mature use cases that could be used to value existing technologies (such as advergames web, mobile or console-based) and that haven’t yet been explored to their full potential that I feel like going to the next hype is somehow pointless… and from an end-user prospective it’s just trash-communication where you enjoy being part of a “premiere” but 5 mins later you get bored and trash the application away without creating any bound with the brand.

Just saw this web page on Nokia’s own N-Gage site which gave ma good 5 minutes laugh. As you can say even Nokia has trouble supporting his own devices …
And the fact that an end-user is going to check his firmware version to see if he can use N-Gage is just a lot of fun to consider.
By the way I’ve tried using N-Gage for years and never got my mobile to let me create a username and connect to the service…

There’s a lot going on right now regarding gaming platforms, and yet while nobody really can tell what the future holds, a couple of patterns are emerging and need some explanations.

Usually crating a video game is pretty straightforward (aside from getting a good game concept and financing the full stuff) : you decide which your target audience is, select the appropriate platform i.e. Nintendo DSi or Wii for casual gaming or PS3/xbox360/PC/PSP for more engaged players and go buy the adequate game engine to serve as the ground basis of your game project. The most well-known game engine around is probably Epic’s UT Engine used in most AAA games including their own graphically mind-blowing Gears of Wars 2. The engine itself is worth about 1MUSD for a AAA game project.

But a couple of things are on the move. First of all, alternatives to those expensive engines are emerging, one of my favorite being Unity‘s which is really full featured (including physics engine and a complete dev environment) and comes at an outrageously low price point below the 10KUSD mark. Funny enough this engine enables to create browser based games while retaining all the 3D graphics and experience of regular standalone games. This shift is getting more and more popular after Id’s launch last week of Quake Live which is a multiplayer-only version of their well-known Quake title.

What’s even more interesting is that game content is being streamed over the network. Thus we can suppose that copyright issues who have been killing the PC game market might be solved through that approach. If we follow David Perry’s thoughts that games will become multiplayer-only, we might be reaching by 2010 a new paradigm in gaming and the return of games to the PC world (which has been kinda devastated by World of Warcraft domination over the last couple years).
The underlying question here will be how game engine manufacturers will adjust to this trend, will they try supporting the wider platform range or will they specialize on their own market segments and games will be bound to exclusivity over which or which platform which is the kind of situation we are heading right now.
If you’re a casual gamer yet sometimes fragger addict you’re going to need a lots of hardware platforms if you don’t want to feel frustrated ! And game developers needing to port their work to various game engines to support all the available platforms is unlikely to happen outside of very high budget productions.