OnLive is really scoring big at E3 this week, demonstrating their wares to show off some truly impressive gaming. One demonstration in particular really shows of what could be the future of gaming: Accessing “the cloud” for massive resources to view on your iPad.
OnLive even has a bluetooth controller they’ll make available, which should bring a more console-like experience for iPad users instead of having to use the touchscreen. Imagine pairing this with up with your HDTV via HDMI using the bluetooth controller, and you begin get a real sense of how truly awesome this could be.
Over at GameTrailers, they sit down with some experts and analysts to talk about the new gaming technology announced at E3, in particular the Wii Vitality Sensor and the Sony Motion Wand controller. They show some interesting examples that I haven’t seen elsewhere and some of the new Sony Augmented Reality games demonstrated like the EyePet and Invizimals.
Barcelona game studio Novarama has jumped on the Augmented Reality craze with a new Sony PSP game that uses the PSP camera to create a creature hunt/capture game called “Invizimals”. It seems it uses pairs of PSP for a multiplayer setup (although presumably a singleplayer mode is available for us lonely folks), and the player first locates & captures a card through covering the marker at the correct time (to “Grab” it). Then the captured creature can be fought Pokemon style against other monsters.
Looks pretty impressive, using basic pattern cards for Augmented Reality tracking, but the camera attachment (Released in Japan in 2006) has yet to reach the US.
James McCombe is taking advantage of the buzz around E3 to talk about the Caustic Graphics raytracing solution. The folks at InfoWorld sit down with him and talk about where the technology and market it heading. While the tone of his responses is a bit condescending, he makes some good points.
We have this small little thing called the 3D professional market, which already places a tremendously high value on ray tracing and is willing to pay for it. And out solution right now without being integrated into a stream processor [or] a separate chip, is it’s still able to provide tremendous orders of magnitude speed gain to that market, and they’re willing to pay for that.
I would say the “3D Professional Market” is a bit more than a “small little thing”. I’m pretty sure the interview also has a typo in it, otherwise he completely dismisses the possibility of seeing the Caustic chipset in gaming consoles right before saying it would be trivial.
McCombe: We see no reason this would be in a game console eventually, it’s just a matter of silicon integration with existing screen processors.
Another interesting tech-demo coming out of E3 is from Peter Molyneux’s “Milo”. Combining the horsepower of the Xbox 360 with their new Project Natal motion tracking system, they’ve developed a “Virtual Person” that you can interact with. Peter Molyneux has long had a reputation for pushing the barrier on games, with Black and White and again with Fable, but this is a whole new arena he’s entered.
More than a game, it’s a social experiment. What is necessary to make the world seem real to a viewer? What is Real? Obviously Milo is not truly intelligent or self aware, but what tricks can be used to make the user think Milo is self-aware? I suspect that there will be a slew of psychological papers published about this, if it ever makes it to market.
See a video of Milo after the break. Also, you can see some of the neat tricks they play with the motion tracking, such as the User’s reflection in the water during interacting with it.
I don’t normally cover video games on VizWorld, but a new trailer for the upcoming “Star Wars: The Old Republic” video game was released today at E3. It’s the usual fare, Sith vs Jedi, but the trailer is a stunning piece of computer graphic work. I don’t have any details of exactly how it was done, but from the sheer amount of motion and actors in the scene I imagine it’s making heavy use of Motion Tracked actors.
OnLive is really scoring big at E3 this week, demonstrating their wares to show off some truly impressive gaming. One demonstration in particular really shows of what could be the future of gaming: Accessing “the cloud” for massive resources to view on your iPad.
Another interesting tech-demo coming out of E3 is from Peter Molyneux’s “Milo”. Combining the horsepower of the Xbox 360 with their new Project Natal motion tracking system, they’ve developed a “Virtual Person” that you can interact with. Peter Molyneux has long had a reputation for pushing the barrier on games, with Black and White and again with Fable, but this is a whole new arena he’s entered.
I don’t normally cover video games on VizWorld, but a new trailer for the upcoming “Star Wars: The Old Republic” video game was released today at E3. It’s the usual fare, Sith vs Jedi, but the trailer is a stunning piece of computer graphic work. I don’t have any details of exactly how it was done, but from the sheer amount of motion and actors in the scene I imagine it’s making heavy use of Motion Tracked actors.
VizWorld.com 
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