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(This article first appeared in the May 22, 2006 issue of Jon Peddie’s TechWatch)

The twelfth annual E3 show officially opened, as has become tradition, with a State of the Industry keynote by Entertainment Software Association (ESA) president and chief cheerleader, Doug Lowenstein. Lowenstein reminisced briefly about the roots of the video game industry before launching into the central theme of this year’s keynote—namely that he believes the video game industry is becoming a transformational industry akin to the automobile, television, computer, and telecommunications industries of the twentieth century.

The basis for his belief stems from research the ESA commissioned from Robert W. Crandall, a Senior Fellow of the Brookings Institution, and J. Gregory Sidak, a visiting professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center. Crandall and Sidak produced a white paper. The white paper based on the results of their research, released at the same time as Lowenstein’s keynote, is available at http://www.theesa.com.

The Crandall and Sidak white paper suggests that, while video games generate $10.3 billion in direct sales (software and hardware) in the U.S., they also generate $7.8 billion in sales of complementary products for a total impact of over $18 billion on the U.S. economy. The complementary products Crandall and Sidak cite include televisions (e.g. HDTVs for Xbox 360), gaming computers (e.g., Voodoo, Alienware), broadband services, CPUs and GPUs, mobile usage, movies based on video game IP, and advertising. A review of Crandall’s and Sidek’s research reveals that many of their conclusions are inferential or based on comments from industry players, such as IBM (one of the three CELL-chip partners, as well as owner of the Power-PC core used in the Xbox 360).

Nevertheless, Lowenstein took much of the research as fact. And while some of the assertions about how video game technologies are being presently being used elsewhere for training and research are sound, they either ignore or are ignorant of the reality that much of that same technology did not in fact originate in video games, but was developed earlier for military, cinematic, and CAD applications.

For example, Crandall and Sidak point to modern-day real-estate and travel websites as evolving from technology transfers from entertainment software, and in particular 3D video game technology, such as first-person shooters. However, that technology originated in CAD programs in the 1980s—the only difference is that due to a lack of computing power, such walkthroughs were typically pre-rendered, fixed-path (or variable path where each branch was pre-rendered) scenes. And virtual reality research, which, while having aspects of entertainment, originated more as an information sharing and communications technology, offered interactive 3D space walkthroughs before video games integrated that technology.

Likewise, they point to modern-day military training where combat simulations are used as a form of virtual training, and suggest that this is directly linked to video game technology. While in a micro view that is certainly true, in a macro view, much of the core technology, such as texture mapping and 3D world navigation, originated with military-funded simulators such as flight simulators developed by Singer and GE in the early 1980s.

What Crandall and Sidak miss is that 3D video gaming technology is evolutionary in the grand scheme of things, and not revolutionary. Without
a doubt, current gaming technology improves things like real-estate walkthroughs, military training simulations, and medical research and simulations in terms of increased real-time interactivity and realism, but the underlying principles have been there all along.

While the $7.8 billion in sales of complementary products attributed to video games may not be really accurate, and is likely inflated, one cannot also deny that video games and the technology that goes into them definitely do have both a technological impact and a sociological one on the lives of most of the people in the Western world.

Lowenstein used that premise to support his perspective that the video game industry will be a transformational industry. He pointed to the fact that by the year 2010, there will be 75 million Americans between the ages of 10 and 30—something he calls the “millennium generation.” That’s as many as there are in the now aging baby boomer generation. And video game content and interaction are certain to provide a potentially broader perspective on a variety of subjects, ultimately making the millennium generation a political force to be reckoned with.

“Even today, ESA data shows that as many as 35% of American parents play video games, and 80% of those play with their kids. Video games are the rock and roll music for the digital generation, and Halo and The Sims and Zelda are their Grateful Deads and their Rolling Stones,” said Lowenstein, to underscore his point.

Lowenstein closed his keynote by reminding all in attendance that transformational industries have both good and bad components. For example, the automobile industry brought pollution and reliance on fossil fuels, television brought concerns about the sedentary life style of a new breed of man known as a couch potato, and telecommunications introduced issues related to the depersonalization of social interaction. On the bright side, Lowenstein said he believed that everyone would agree that the positives of past transformational industries overwhelmed the negatives, and that the coming years would hopefully see the transition of video games from pure entertainment into video games as a central feature in the economy, business, and education of America.

That certainly is a laudable goal, both on a U.S. level as well as an international one, but the roadblocks ahead, such as high console and title prices, the efforts to criminalize the sale of certain games to youngsters, and the stigma that game playing produces violent and aberrant behavior are serious, and may be difficult to overcome.

(This article first appeared in the May 22, 2006 issue of Jon Peddie’s TechWatch)

While the big hit of E3 was undoubtedly the Nintendo Wii and its unique and innovative game controllers, never let it be said that there isn’t someone else out there willing to build and offer a better mouse or other input device. And, as is usual at E3, the most interesting of these new devices were to be found in the exhibit “dungeon” of E3, also known as Kentia Hall.

Novint Falcon
Perhaps the most novel new input device (other than that of the Nintendo Wii) I found was the Novint Falcon (see image below), a 3D haptic input device a bit reminiscent of some sort of alien beast from a futuristic first-person shooter. To use the Falcon, you grab the round handle on the front and move it around. Each of the three arms of the Falcon is connected to electrical motors, which can each, individually, create a force on the handle. In combination, the force can be generated in any direction and at any magnitude (up to a certain maximum).

In demonstrations that Novint provided, the haptic response of the Falcon was quite realistic as I moved a ball cursor around a bumpy sphere and in and out of a gelatin surface. For gaming, the device can be used to simulate gun recoil (the handle has several buttons on it for use as mouse button substitutes) or feel walls and surfaces in the “dark” (think “Doom 3” or “F.E.A.R.”).

Novint’s goal is to be able to have the Falcon in gamers’ hands by 2007 for a retail price of under $99 for the USB version. That’s ambitious for a device of this complexity, when one considers standard retail channel multipliers. The Falcon is certainly innovative, but unless haptic support APIs become a standard feature that games utilize, there’s not much hope the device will be a gamer’s mainstay. But it sure is a cool device (www.novint.com).

XKPad’s Bodypad
Not being one for strenuous exercise, nor for fighting games, I did not spend much time with the Bodypad from XKPad (see image below), but it certainly promises to offer a very intense workout. In addition to strap-on wireless sensors for one’s limbs, there are button controls one holds in one’s fists that can be used to simulate pressing buttons on a typical game controller. By moving one’s limbs (or flailing them, in my case), signals are sent to the receiver, which parses them into controller signals and sends them to an attached PS2 or Xbox console. Cost is around €50, and it is available now from XKPad in France as well as certain on-line outlets (www.bodypad.com).

Sandio Game O’
And yes, there may be a better mouse, or at least that’s what the principals of Sandio Technology are hoping. The Sandio Game O’ (yes—that single
quote is part of the name) is a 3D gaming mouse. Built around an optical mouse core, the Game O’ adds a couple of additional buttons, as well as three joysticks/thumbsticks to the mouse—one on the left, one on the right, and one in front (see image below). Using the driver software for the Game O’, the user configures a joystick-to-keyboard translation. For example, the left joystick (which is a thumbstick for those of us who are righthanded) can be mapped to the traditional W-A-S-D keys used to move one’s FPS character forward, backward, left, and right.

Sandio is promoting the Game O’ as a 6DOF mouse, and I suppose if games supported real 6DOF input, the Game O’ could certainly be used for that purpose. But, the reality is that most games only require basic movement in one plane (forward/backward and strafe left/right), plus rotation in two planes (turn left/right and look up/down). Roll (which would be rotation about the view axis) is not a commonly used or required movement in games I am familiar with.

In playing a bit of “Unreal 2004 Tournament” with the Game O’ I can certainly see how the device could be useful. In fact, with the Game O’, it’s possible to completely stop using the keyboard for game input, but it requires your dominant hand to be very agile.

The Game O’ should be shipping later this year for a price comparable to a high-end 2D mouse (www.sandiotech.com).

Splitfish dualFX
I first saw and played with the Splitfish dualFX PS2 controller (see photo below) at CES in January. It features a two-piece design that seems somewhat similar to Nintendo’s Wii controllers, even to the point where the righthand controller has a laser you point at the screen for character movement and targeting. However, there is no tilt sensing.

While the tooling is smoother than in January’s prototype, I still had issues using the laser pointer as my guidance device—perhaps because the controller’s thumbstick was too convenient to continue using, since that is what I am used to.

The gun trigger design for firing (replacing the PS2’s R1 button) was comfortable, and I found if I used the dualFX as a replacement PS2 controller and ignored the laser pointing, it felt pretty natural, and in some ways even better than a regular PS2 controller because my hands no longer needed to be wedged together.
The dualFX should ship in June. Retail pricing was not available (www.splitfish.com).

GestureTek
My kids enjoy the EyeToy on the Sony PS2, and were overjoyed when I told them that there would be a similar piece of hardware coming from Microsoft at the end of the year. That’s the Xbox Live Vision Camera. While no doubt there will be EyeToy-like games for the new Xbox camera, one thing that Microsoft has done differently is to license APIs and software from Canadian company GestureTek.

Those APIs allow a camera embedded or attached to a device to be used as an alternate input device, detecting motion and location of objects as a form of input. In addition to the well-known hand-waving form of camera input, however, the GestureTek technology includes both face tracking (see photo above), as well as delta motion detection. For the latter, I was given a demonstration in which the camera in a camera phone could be used as the basis for a joystick for a mobile game. Simply tilting the phone in any direction would cause appropriate input and motion in the game, and it was all done detecting direction of tilt optically via the camera.

More interesting was the suggestion that Microsoft was considering using the face-tracking technology as an input in games like “Halo 3,” but in subtle ways, such as tracking a player’s face to see if the player was trying to peek around a corner to see what might be there (and if you ever play FPS games, you will know that they require a certain amount of body English) and then simulating that action in the game. I am certainly looking forward to this and other innovative uses of visual input technology (www.gesturetek.com).

Microsoft
And speaking of Microsoft, while they were not in Kentia Hall, the company did introduce a new input device for the Xbox 360, in addition to the aforementioned Xbox camera. To complement the forthcoming racing game, “Forza Motorsport 2,” Microsoft will offer the Xbox 360 Wireless Racing Wheel, which features a steering wheel, gas and brake pedals, and a table mount (see photo below). While the wheel apparently
does provide some sort of force feedback, I was told that to use that you would want to plug it into a power source, otherwise the battery would drain very quickly. No price was announced, but it will be available in the fourth quarter of 2006 (www.xbox.com).

Also of Note:

(A version of this article appeared in the January 16, 2006 issue of Jon Peddie’s TechWatch)

Sony and Sony’s Chairman and CEO, Sir Howard Stringer, took the stage at CES 2006 to announce Sony’s new focus on being an entertainment company on all fronts. Stringer’s presentation served as the opening keynote for the show, and was preceded by an introduction by Gary Shapiro, president and CEO of the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA). The CEA is the entity which puts on CES each year.

Shapiro’s message was mostly political in nature, underscored by his bringing forth Nevada’s U.S. senator, John Ensign. Both Shapiro and the senator had strong messages about not restricting the consumer electronics market nor consumer’s access to content and information. There was a subtle irony in these messages preceding Sony’s keynote, as Sony is a major proponent of DRM – witness the recent Sony BMG root kit DRM fiasco as a prime example.

Stringer’s opening message addressed the Sony BMG copy protection problem only in passing, suggesting that it was not Sony’s intent to punish consumers, but merely protect content and the rights of artists (a number of whom came out in recent months asking not to be protected in the fashion that Sony had chosen, incidentally). I had the sense from Stringer’s comments that it appears Sony was more upset that it was caught, rather than remorseful that they had done something they should not have. It probably did not help that Stringer read everything off of one or more of around a half dozen teleprompters scattered about the stage and above the audience’s heads, as that made his performance rather stiff and stuffy.

Sony’s new mission, under the title “Entertaining the Future”, was the theme for the remainder of Stringer’s keynote, leveraging the brand that is Sony, based on four pillars, which Stringer dubbed e-Entertainment, Digital Cinema, High-er Definition, and PlayStation.

Sir Howard explained that the “e” in “e-Entertainment” stood not only for “electronic”, but also for “everyone”, in the sense that everyone can create, distribute, consume, and communicate, and thus e-Entertainment was personal entertainment, and in the context of Sony’s new mission this meant “recognizing and accommodating the needs of the individual, providing choice and convenience in all of the ways consumers use products.” Lofty goals, but as Stringer indicated no desire to diminish Sony’s DRM efforts, it appears that the choice and convenience provided are limited to what Sony wants to or is willing to provide.

Stringer paraded forth the new Sony Ericsson W810 Walkman phone as one example of e-Entertainment – it features a 2 megapixel camera, EDGE network data access, quad-band support, an MP3 player, and, oh yes, a phone. For some reason I can’t fathom, the audience was then subjected to a short portion of a Franz Ferdinand song played off the W810 via the sound system to demonstrate the sound quality of the new phone. I’m not sure I can tell the difference of music playback by a Sony Ericsson Walkman versus a $25 MP3 player from Taiwan or even a $399 iPod these days, but I could tell that it was a source of pride to Sony that their phone’s music playback sounded the way it did.

Also featured under the e-Entertainment banner was the slim Sony Cybershot T9 camera, which really is a nice piece of hardware (the media got to check out all of the things Stringer discussed at a media preview the night before), featuring image stabilization and better low light imaging. And there was the Sony HDR-HC1 HD camcorder too.

But the real star of Stringer’s e-Entertainment was the Sony Reader, a device not much larger than an oversized paperback book, which uses digital paper to allow people to read electronic books. The Sony Reader will ship by the end of March at a price of $299 to $399, and users will be able to view 7500 pages on a single battery charge. Internal memory will store up to a hundred books, with removable MemoryStick and SD storage adding hundreds more books and images which can be accessed at will. Initially, e-books will be available from Sony’s CONNECT store, price yet to be determined. Web content and blogs will also be downloadable to the Sony Reader.

Stringer brought out famed author Dan Brown, whose “The Da Vinci Code” would be among the first e-books available for the Sony Reader. Brown lauded the benefit of the Sony Reader to researchers, students, and travelers alike, although he did profess to still wanting to read real books in the comfort of his own home. One interesting point Brown did make was that devices like the Sony Reader would allow publishers to take risks on lesser known authors because the investment in e-book content was minimal compared to having to prepare a print run (see related blog entry).

The e-Entertainment discussion concluded with a demonstration of Sony’s LocationFree technology, where a Sony PSP on stage was used to view television (and change channels) in New York City as well as in Tokyo.

The next “pillar” Stringer covered was that of Digital Cinema, represented by Sony’s 4K digital projection system, based on SXRD high definition technology. For star support of Sony’s efforts in this venue, Stringer first brought out director Ron Howard and producer Brian Glazer, responsible for the forthcoming cinematic adaptation of “The Da Vinci Code”. They also read from teleprompters, but did reward the audience’s patience with a short clip from the movie, starring Tom Hanks. The clip was projected with the Sony SXRD projector, of course.

The highlight of the keynote, however, was when Tom Hanks himself joined Stringer, Howard, and Glazer, and did not read from the teleprompter, although he initially made believe that he did: “It’s a pleasure to be here with you today, Howard, to be able to deliver these heartfelt comments off of one of your new extraordinary Sony SXRD high-definition teleprompters.” Hanks continued to adlib and improvise, much to Stringer’s discomfort and closed by saying that Stringer should know that actors would do anything if money were involved – even doing podcasts. Stringer did not know how to respond to that.

It’s not clear that having these stars on stage really helped Stringer get his point across that Sony’s Digital Cinema initiative will be revolutionary for movie theaters, however. But it was entertaining, and entertainment is what the new Sony is all about.

For “High-er Definition” Stringer trotted out sportscaster Greg Gumbel who sang the praises (courtesy of the teleprompter) of HD television broadcast for sports. The discussion moved over to HD programming from CBS and Sky TV, and then into Blu-Ray. Stringer explained why he felt Blu-Ray was the wave of the future in HD media technologies, and why a number of major studios including Sony Pictures, were supporting Blu-Ray. He also indicated that Sony was first to announce Blu-Ray support last year at E3 with the unveiling of the PlayStation 3.

Interestingly, at this point Stringer brought out Michael Dell as a supporter of Blu-Ray. Dell is a major competitor to Sony’s PC product line, arguably the main competitor, and according to Michael Dell, Dell has approximately 40% of the U.S. flat panel display market too. After Dell’s sales pitch for his company’s wares, Stringer closed by saying “if you want a really expensive laptop, buy a VAIO”. Stringer’s comment fell with a thud, as you might expect. Perhaps it was a planned answer to a comment from Dell that Dell didn’t make, but Stringer stuck with the telepompter script.Not exactly the sort of sales pitch I think Sony should be making (even though I agree, especially as an owner of several Sony VAIO laptops).

The last pillar of Sony’s new mission was “PlayStation”, and Stringer brought in Kaz Hirai, president and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainmnet America, to do clean-up. Sadly, Kaz had nothing new to share about the PS3. No dates, prices, or anything else that had not already been said elsewhere.

Sony’s keynote was really more of a sales pitch for Sony’s products, under the thinly veiled guise of refocusing on Entertainment as the core mission for the company. The only real interesting technological development in which Sony was differentiating itself from countless competitors was the Sony Reader. Other e-book systems exist, but none so far with the capabilities and ergonomics of the Sony Reader. Most of the other products discussed were ones Sony had already been shipping for a short while, or ho-hum upgrades to older products.

Sony does have an incredibly well known and well respected brand, and it would be foolish for them to not leverage as much out of the inherent goodwill the Sony name has as they can. And certainly, as both a content provider and a technology company, they have the potential at combining the best of both worlds. But, because of that Sony is also between a rock and a hard place with respect to DRM. On one hand, as a content provider, they feel they need to lead the DRM charge (even if the results are a catastrophic PR mess), while on the technology side, DRM stifles their innovative potential. Case in point is the the VAIO XL1 Digital Living System, which is limited to a physical 200 DVD media changer instead of the ability to rip and store however many DVDs the user has hard disk space for in the device.

In any event, in order to maintain its perceived role as a technology leader, Sony needs to continue to truly innovate, and do so in a very public fashion. However, having Sir Howard Stringer as their pitchman is not the way for Sony to get its message across to a broad audience. To paraphrase Tom Hanks, Sir Howard might be better off back in his Knighthood Club where all the “Sirs” get together to order pizzas and talk about the Queen and let someone more dynamic be the front man for Sony.