Mobitrends

Vuziz has announced yesterday that they are releasing an adaptor cable to connect their 3D eyewear glasses to the iPhone. This is really nice, but still lets me wonder when Vuzix will understand that the key factor of success for their devices is not supporting x numbers of hardware platforms but rather having games take advantage of them… and publishing an SDK is definitely not the way they will get any attention from the major game studios thus letting their devices remain cool geeky toys…

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!

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.

It’s all over the blogs, Microsoft might be looking to buy 3DV Systems for $35 million, the producer of a 3D webcam device that would be able to get plugged into the xbox 360 to compete with Sony’s EyeToy and bring casual games to the xbox 360 platform.
While I think this is a smart move for Microsoft as they definitely need to catch up in the casual games market which means enabling fun without the hassle of learning to master the so complicated controller they have, I must confess I’m not such a big fan of that kind of technology.
What mainly bothers me with that system, is that you have to remain in plain sight of the camera to be able to play, and in my personal case I’m never twice on the same spot. Also casual game means also multi-player games, i.e. 4 players at the same time on the same platform. The raving rabbits are just so much fun when everyone plays together and the portions where you lay alone on the Wii Fit kinda suck – and that’s the kind of experience that a dedicated camera can only provide.

Yet while I’m not such a big fan of the use case I’m really happy to see that Microsoft is feeling the power of accessories to deliver engaging gaming experience, which is also the main objective of VR-WEAR : mix immersive and interactive technologies to create a strong engagement in the game !
Microsoft, if you read me, I’m ready to sell for just a bit less than 35MUSD !

Damn that’s the killer app… the JoyDick !

Asus is expanding its “Eee” line to uncovered market areas… such as gaming. We can wonder how legit Asus is to do that, especially when you see that this product looked so alone in his corner of the huge stand (not even a produt manager to demonstrate it).

This is the most amazing arcade machine I’ve ever seen – hemispherical immersive display, touch sensitive screen, rfid card to store player’s achievements… can’t wait to try it ! (only available in Japan yet unfortunately). Feels like going to Japan just to experience that ! Thanks Theodore for showing me this during this morning’s design session !