Wednesday, December 2, 2009

The Future of Next Gen Consoles


Next Gen Consoles:
Next Generation Consoles, also known as NGC, is the future for digital home entertainment. NGC has become a central hub for social interaction and digital entertainment. These powerful consoles are known for their advancements in wireless technology and virtual communicational systems. NGCs are making billions of dollars due to the gaming engineers who put these data crunching machines together. Each gaming console offers a different experience. Each console caters to different age demographics. Two of the powerful NGCs are the PlayStation 3, or better known as PS3, and the Xbox 360. I foresee NGCs having games with Artificial Intelligence that are able to speak to its players as if they have known them all their lives. This is due to future developments in NGC technology. I believe that the next level of NGC will have 3-D capabilities, instant Wi-Fi downloads, clearer pictures, and a digital library with copious amounts of downloadable content. Another concept that will become a reality will be the merging of NGCs with standard cable boxes. After reading countless articles on NGCs, I found that many of the newer TVs will be able to receive data wirelessly from any Internet source. Televisions will not need any assistance from a third-party device to show downloaded digital content. The Wall Street Journal article, Beyond Gaming: Watching TV on Your Xbox, put it ever so eloquently, “Videogame consoles like the Xbox 360 and Sony Corp.’s PlayStation 3 were designed primarily to play games, but the gadgets are increasingly evolving into multimedia home entertainment devices as manufacturers add nongame features” (WSJ).

Electronic Entertainment Expo:
Every year, leading companies in the video game industry, such as Microsoft’s Xbox, Sony’s PlayStation, and Nintendo, flock to the Los Angeles convention center for the Electronic Entertainment Expo, known in the gaming world as E3 expo. This is where small software companies and large gaming corporations showcase their work to the masses and get gamers feedback. Many of the large gaming companies use this time to have private conferences on new technological break throughs on their own particular console. The president of Entertainment Software Associates (ESA) performed a study, which showed that “Sixty-eight percent of American households play computer or video games” (E3 Press Release). Many of the video game companies use this time to put out new game titles to measure crowd reaction. They then go back and make minor or major changes depending on the crowd’s reaction to their title. So this is really a convention for gamers, owners, and creators to bring new and innovative ideas to gaming consoles.

PlayStation 3:
At this year’s E3, they announced the future of NGC. During the convention, PlayStation announced the new motion controller that has 1:1 ratio tracking capabilities. This means that the next PlayStation gaming system will be able to place both you and the controller in a free floating space. The new motion controller will move as fast as your hand moves and this is all due to a device called the PlayStation eye that tracks the motion controller’s position. Sony Computer Entertainment is a subsidiary of the Sony conglomerate. Under Sony Computer Entertainment, Sony was able to form a network of users. PlayStation Network has over 20 million users; this number continues to grow daily due to this system’s unique selling point, which is free network access. Other NGCs do not offer free network access. The PS3 console is able to access the Internet (wirelessly), instant messaging, Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace accounts all from the comfort of your couch. In a New York Times article, Bits; Netflix to Stream to PlayStation 3, Brad Stone announced, “Next month, the nine million American owners of Sony’s PlayStation 3 consoles will have another entertainment option available: streaming movies and TV shows from Netflix” (NYT). Thus, Sony Computer Entertainment America, Inc. (SCEA) came up with new enhancements for the PlayStation Network by adding downloadable content such as PlayStation Store, and PlayStation Home. PlayStation Home offers users a chance to be able to download digital content such as games, photos, videos and music. SCEA was also able to add new partners to their family, such as Showtime, G4, E!, Magnolia Films, and TNA.

Technological Advancements:
Game consoles have come a long way since the Magnavox Odyssey, which was the first generation console. It wasn’t until the Atari 2600, along with the creation of Pong, that home consoles made their mark in gaming history. However, the gaming industry has made quantum leaps since the first generation console. Video game companies have gone from cartridges, to compact discs, to wireless. In an online article, Profiting from Social Gaming, David Perry says, “…the long-term future of the game industry is digital, and will not include physical media at all. Consoles and even handhelds connect online and the hardware makers such as Nintendo (7974.T), Microsoft (MSFT), and Sony (SNE) have all launched their own online game stores” (Business Week Online). So this means that broadband capabilities have to be widely accessible and robust enough to accommodate large amounts of users on gaming servers. Major companies such as Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony will get rid of cartridges and compact discs because they will become antiquated due to digital downloading. An article from the School Library Journal called, The Future of Gaming: Gamers and gaming are changing with the times - are librarians? Beth Gallaway makes the assertion that, “With ever-increasing access to higher bandwidths and high-speed Internet connections, more and more games will be downloadable and played digitally” (SLJ). Multiple sources have come to the same conclusion that as the Internet becomes faster, more and more gaming fans will get the majority of their games by downloading them. Many of the NGCs have Bluetooth wireless controllers. This is due to players not having adequate seating near the console. So gaming companies took this into account and made the game controllers with Bluetooth capabilities. This allows players the ability to move freely without being restricted to the length of a cord connected to the system. However, the battery life of each consoles controller does limit each cycles charge. Each console has two USB ports that allow players to hook up a USB cord to charge the controllers. On average, the battery life for each charge should last 20 hours.



Project Natal:

The next console that has something even better than PlayStations motion controller, with 1:1 ratio is the Xbox 360. Microsoft’s secret project named, Project Natal, showcased new and groundbreaking ideas dealing with interactivity and new game dynamics. Project Natal has full body motion capture, facial recognition, controller free entertainment (people themselves become the controller), playing games together as a family, scanning capabilities, connect and share (video chat w/ friends), and voice recognition. Milo was shown at 2009’s E3 expo, it was a demo game where an artificial boy recognized a person through facial recognition. The artificial being is also able to show human emotion through facial expressions. The games are becoming more engaging as far as human interaction is concerned. With this type of break through in technology, games such as Milo show promising results. One of the benefits would be game users becoming more fit due to the amount of physical participation needed to reach a desired goal. In a design week magazine article, The next level, Iain Simons said, “… Natal has taken controller reduction to its logical conclusion. Using a combination of depth-sensing RGB camera and a multi-array microphone, the system is able to read full-body gestures in three dimensions and recognize individual voices and faces—all within a small add-on to a standard Xbox 360 console” (Design Week).

Social Aspect:
The people who own these gaming systems range from kids to adults. Many gamers play with people in foreign countries and friends from school for what seems to be a global network of friends with a common interest. Due to the game industry’s global network of people, NGCs allow players from the United States to interact with players from other continents and enjoyed their camaraderie. Because of the need of those who want to be socially interactive with others, it’s only a matter of time before players will want to pause in the middle of their game, access their social networks and have their friends join into their game. But one aspect that is already a reality is the freedom to check Facebook and Twitter from the console’s home screen, however, the option that is not available yet is checking these updates and speaking with friends while in the middle of a game. While reading a Wall Street Journal article, Beyond Gaming: Watching TV on Your Xbox, I came across a college grad student from Sanford University who owns an Xbox 360 console and had this to say, “…[I am] interested in trying the console’s Facebook and Twitter features. But [I expect] them to be integrated into the videogame experience in a way that’s not possible through [my] PC—allowing users to find friends on Facebook that they can play games with, for example. ‘I think it all depends on how it’s been implemented,’ he says” (WSJ).

Virtual Reality:
Video game companies want to use the new 3D technology that many of the movie producers are using. The one major set back is televisions not having 3D-enabled capabilities. The older models do not have the proper refresh rates as some computer monitors, which need 120Hz for the necessary displaying capabilities. Newer TV models will have the capabilities to display 3D movies and games. In a Video Business article, Games push 3D at home: first stereoscopic titles launch this fall, Ubisoft, game company, feels “…so confident that advanced 3D at home is the future, it will debut a stereoscopic Avatar for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, which are connected to TVs, later this year” (Video Business). Three-dimensional gaming offers endless educational possibilities for medical students to deal with real-life situations. They are already using this application on TV shows. It’s only a matter of time before society starts using holographic images to teach doctors how to cure and/or operate on patients. In addition, there’s also the possibility of using this technology to solve crimes. A PC World article talked about how criminal investigation teams will use videogame technology to help police forensic scientist to virtually re-create crime scenes.

My vision of the NGC:
Based on all the information provided above, I believe that the future of gaming will involve everyone. Games will not be played alone anymore; social networking will become more and more popular; DVDs and CDs will be a thing of the past; and many of the new games and movies coming out will be digitally downloaded to a hand-held hard drive. People will have to start carrying most of their information as digital copies of originals. I think a lot of the gamers will be downloading far more information that can be stored on current storage devices. Game companies will have to think about people saving terabytes of information, on a daily basis to their gaming systems. Also, due to game physics becoming more complex and requiring more processors (e.g., microchips), data are moving faster than any game designers could imagine. A Design News article explained what the PS3 could do and what engineers had to take into account to get this small electronic device to work like a small, super computer. In the Design News article, PS3: Fast and Cool, Steve Murray, a senior technical editor, had this to say about the system, “There, engineers built atop an IBM 64-bit PowerPC core, creating a multiprocessor CPU by augmenting the original device with seven specialized co-processors based on a single-instruction multiple-data (SIMD) architecture. Known as the Cell Broadband Engine, the seven-core device is targeted at data-intensive processing applications, like those found in cryptography, high-end science and gaming… The work with Rambus, meanwhile, endows the machine with two big bandwidth channels, providing an extraordinary aggregate bandwidth of 65 Gbytes/sec to the PS3” (Design News). With this type of speed, we are playing games that require the processing speed of several computers. Next, I believe that 3D virtual realities will naturally become part of NGC. They will have gamers immersed in a world were they are able to take on the roles of the major protagonists in games, thus broadening players’ minds to a world of bountiful story plots and twists. Another aspect that will begin to spread like wildfire is cloud computing. Starting this year, new NGCs will be the wave of the future. Read about the new system in this PC World article. Many of the gaming systems already have characteristics of a supercomputer, and many of the games will be played in real-time without levels having to load before a match starts. One games in particular that showcases massive multi-players online playing together is the game MAG, which stands for Massive Action Game. This game will allow 256 players to play in real-time on a battlefield. Sony had to upgrade their servers to handle 256 players to log into a game and play over three days to see what team would win. Servers will also have to be reconfigured to handle even larger amounts of bandwidth for player accessibility. Without a serious upgrade to bandwidth and servers, the future of NGC will cease to exist.



How I Envision New NGC:

I envision the new NGC to be similar to Project Natal. The human body will become the controller, while all the data are stored onto a small device that will fit into the palm of your hand and everything will activate through voice recognition via a small optical device. People will not have to buy CDs and Discs to enjoy game play. All games will be stored on super-fast, high bandwidth servers that are digitally transferred to TVs or a small hand-held box. Body gestures will be read through the small camera device to allow users to feel as though they have become a virtual avatar. This brings up interesting issues. One of these issues is, will this cause future gamers to become more dissociative with reality? Only time will tell!

Keywords: PlayStation 3, Project Natal, The future of Gaming, Next Generation Consoles, Gaming Networks.

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