Task 5

3D and experimental areas of hardware for gaming – The growth and invention

 

In the gaming world there are a lot of different technologies to be seen and used in order to enhance the game play experience, for example in early days of gaming, arcades would have a steering wheel for driving games, and some of them would even have pedals, proper car seats and gear sticks in order to simulate being in a real car. This enhances the games experience massively due to giving the player a sense of immersion and suspension of belief that they could be driving a car in a race.

As technology and games have developed and advanced; things like cameras, voice/face recognition, virtual and augmented reality and other peripherals have become commonplace and widely used all over the world. The most common of these are the cameras and voice recognition, especially so with the newer consoles which include cameras and microphones bundled, with software and games that take advantage of the features that this brings, for example in Skyrim you can shout at the console, the microphone will hear this and make you “shout” in the game, which is a form of magic in that universe.

Virtual reality, or VR, is another of these peripheral types. It’s a simulated environment that can create the feeling of actual presence within a game world. Depending on how complex it gets, you can use VR to simulate almost every sense, with the obvious being sight, sound and touch and the lesser used smell and taste – but these two senses aren’t utilized currently for games and virtual reality. A lot of the VR headsets nowadays use stereoscopic displays, meaning that there is one screen displaying two similar images and a lens for each of your eyes. These lenses create it so that there is one image to be seen for you and therefore creates the illusion of depth.

The majority of VR is defined by head mounted displays, or a screen that is held over your eyes by being strapped to your head. This type of device works in the sense that it uses stereoscopic 3D to give the user a sense of immersion and “being” within the game, while tricking the brain by using 3D binaural audio and having the user in-game turn when the player turns his head, as if he was the person playing in first person. This makes for a very immersive experience, but as such this can make people feel very ill sometimes due to there not being any sort of sense of motion, even though the eyes can see the motion.

Augmented reality, or AR, is a little different. AR is more about viewing the real world where things have been changed, or augmented, by computers with sound and graphics. The view of reality is changed usually by a camera and has things added or taken away, this doesn’t quite give the same sense of “being” as virtual reality, but that’s not what augmented reality tries to achieve, AR’s function is mainly to alter the content of the current perception of reality rather than give the user a sense of a new reality.

One example of this is the new Hololens by Microsoft, which is supposedly in development. It’s the closest that anyone has seen to a merge of virtual and augmented reality. It’s a head mounted display that will constantly have you within the augmented reality “world” where things are changed around you based on small sensors that you can place around for the headset to detect, but not a lot is currently known about this device other than a short video which I will link here;

[LINK 2 VIDEO PLS]

Another short example is the Nintendo 3DS which has a camera that picks up a certain symbol, which is also on certain cards, when it sees this symbol it will display a typical Nintendo character standing atop of the symbol, which is fairly cool, but has little use in gaming and thus far augmented reality as a whole has few games that utilize its full potential.

The last thing I want to talk about is 3D screens, there are a lot of ways to achieve a 3D effect on a screen, for example the aforementioned stereoscopic display. The most basic way of doing this is to show two slightly offset images displayed to each eye to give the perception of depth. Wikipedia states that “Although the term “3D” is ubiquitously used, it is important to note that the presentation of dual 2D images is distinctly different from displaying an image in three full dimensions.” – meaning that when you move your eye, you won’t gain any new information about the object you are observing.

One type is polarization 3D, which is two images projected onto the same screen through different polarizing filters, and the glasses that you wear also have a pair of polarizing filters oriented differently so that each eye sees a different image which the brain perceives as having 3D depth.

The Nintendo 3DS uses autosteroscopy, which is imposing two images onto a sheet or screen and having strips of each image sliced and bent towards each eye, so that each eye then sees a different version of that same image, producing the 3D effect. The only bad point with this is that the user has to be at a certain angle and distance for this to function properly.

Actual 3D displays are in development, but their uses for gaming aren’t clear right now as they would be too expensive to make en masse, but we can remain hopeful about the future of technology for gaming!