The Future of Gaming
3-D Gaming
This was being demonstrated by numerous companies including Intel, Sony and Nvidia. I tried it out and it definitely seemed interesting, but I wasn't blown away yet. I think they will get better and better at this though and it has a lot of potential. It definitely seems like Avatar has spurred 3-D fever in the industry. The downside is this requires the investment in a 3-D enabled TV or monitor. It will be interesting to see if and when this comes to the web.
Motion-Recognition
With the Wii's success both Microsoft and Sony are releasing their own motion based games. I got to see the Sony motion controllers and camera (the "Sony Move") in action. It looked very similar to the Wii remote, though there were two of them and they were being used in tandem with a camera. There was a casual painting game that I saw in action. However, it looks like there were some other ones that were a bit more fun. I think Sony and Microsoft are going to be facing the same challenge that Nintendo has, which is having games that are more than just novelty casual games. Unfortunately Microsoft didn't have a demo of their project Natal that I was hoping to see.
Brain-Wave Scanning
I tried this out from a company called Neurosky. I saw this one demo where they had someone focusing their mind and it would cause a firework to go up in the air. The more you focused the higher it would go and after you blinked it would pop the firework.
Another game I saw compared two individuals' brainwaves. Each person's brainwave was indicated by a color. So if they thought about similar things, their brainwaves would become more in sync and the colors would match.
They had a bunch of other stuff (Virtual Reality, Eye Tracking, Streaming Console Games through the Internet, etc..) there as well, but this was all I could experience in the short hour I had.
Harpreet Sandhu




