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Darren Waters

Just shoot me

  • Darren Waters
  • 22 Feb 08, 23:43 GMT

Gaming's obsession with immersion is never ending. We've had HD, 3D, brain control and now you can strap on a jacket and helmet and feel the force of shots on your body and to your head.

FPS jacket and headset is a peripheral designed to get you closer to the action.

The vest was developed by a US surgeon, Dr Mark Ombrellaro, originally as a medical diagnostic tool for tele-health, to do heath checks remotely.

There are eight air pressure units in the jacket and four in the helmet. Each time you are shot, or damaged in the game, you feel it on the jacket.

It's most dramatic when you are hit in the head.

The jacket and headset works with a limited range of titles, including Half Life 2 and Doom 3, but there is an API for developers to adapt their games.

So... can you imagine strapping this on and playing?

Rory Cellan-Jones

Facebook - back to the kids?

  • Rory Cellan-Jones
  • 22 Feb 08, 11:20 GMT

Facebook - it's so over. That's been the tenor of most of the commentary since showing a slight dip in Facebook's UK users. The general feeling is that the kids, with their minute attention spans, have already tired of the social networking site and moved on to something more hip and happening. I think the opposite is true - that Facebook's new wave of older users have decided it is just not worth the bother and are now leaving it to the kids.

Facebook websiteFacebook was already well established on every student campus in Spring 2007, when it grabbed the attention of the London media. Suddenly every national newspaper and broadcaster was desperate to write about it - and I was one of the worst offenders. Stories I did for the Radio 4 Today programme and for asked whether people like me were too old for social networking. They got than just about anything I have ever written, with over a thousand people getting in touch to assure me that socialising online was not just for students. I soon found myself connecting with hundreds of people on Facebook - many of whom I did not know from Adam - and rather enjoyed this new virtual social life.

I suspect the same thing was happening in newsrooms - and other workplaces - across Britain, as an older generation decided that if the kids were finding it impossible to run their lives without Facebook, it must be worth trying. That all helped propel Mark Zuckerberg's company to the top of the social networking league in the UK, with 8.9 million users by the end of 2007. But by then I was already finding that many of my wrinklier Facebook friends had tired of the ceaseless vampire-biting, hugging, poking and other daft aspects of the increasingly cluttered and annoying site. Their status updates started to say "...falling out of love with Facebook" and then they disappeared altogether.

But I see no signs that on the campuses where it all started Facebook fatigue has set in. A few weeks ago I did a story with a student who was having trouble deleting - but when I suggested that he delete his Facebook profile too, he was not keen. For him, and hundreds of thousands like him, a student social life was still dependent on Facebook.

I'm still using Facebook - though less compulsively than before - but I suspect that most of the over-25 age group will now find they can live without it. That still leaves a large core audience, but one that Facebook may find slightly harder to sell to the advertisers on whom its future depends. And that means that $15bn valuation that Microsoft put on the business when it bought a small stake last year looks more fanciful than ever.

Darren Waters

The next 3D revolution?

  • Darren Waters
  • 22 Feb 08, 04:30 GMT

This year's Consumer Electronics Show had a number of 3D TV technologies on show. And now similar technology has turned up at GDC.

Graphics giant Nvidia has developed technology than can give games a true 3D perspective using polarising glasses and stereoscopic display systems.

Nvidia's system uses software drivers which split the video output into two views, which are slightly out of alignment.

The demo system I was shown had a 46inch television, which had a passive polarising filter over the screen. It takes each scan line from the images and selects it either for the left or right eye.

The glasses map those views to the appropriate eye. Without the glasses you see the two views.

Nvidia say developers don't have to do any extra work for their games to work with the system - but do have to follow some rules.

About 80 games will work with the system at launch, which comes in a few weeks.

So how effective is it? From the demo I was shown, very.

But what I was shown was pretty limited - a menu screen for Age of Empires III, which rendered a townscape into an impressive diorama which felt like you could reach in and touch roof tops and people at the back of the view.

The other demo was a flight simulator and that proved very effective. A sense of depth when flying is very valuable and it definitely aided the experience.

The TV it was being demonstrated on cost more than $6,000 but I'm told there are compatible displays for under $1,000.

Quite who is willing to pay out for such an embryonic technology remains to be seen.

Darren Waters

Lunch with Luminaries

  • Darren Waters
  • 22 Feb 08, 02:31 GMT

What happens when you gather some of the games industry's and get them to tackle some of the biggest issues facing their business?

luminaries_1.jpgYou get one hell of a conversation.

I was lucky enough today to sit in on the Lunch with Luminaries, an event pulled together by stellar developer Dave Perry and involving veteran designer Peter Molyneux, one of the pioneers of online gaming Raph Koster, the head of EA's LA studio, Neil Young, Sony's head of worldwide studios Phil Harrison and Chris Taylor, the creator of Dungeon Siege.

About 10 journalists were invited to the lunch and we sat there mostly silent as the proceedings unfolded. We had been invited to chip in with questions but we all sat there just listening, furiously scribbling notes.

At times it felt like listening in on a private conversation because the participants were by and large frank and open:

Phil Harrison was complaining how Sony in Japan had dismissed social gaming, something the company in Europe had been pioneering with Buzz and Singstar.

He said: "And our Japanese colleagues said that there is no such thing as social gaming in Japan – people do not play games on the same sofa together in each other's homes. It will never happen. And then out comes the Wii."

Harrison also lauded Apple for their iPhone user interface, and then pondered if they would license their patents....

Peter Molyneux got so excited about a new feature in his upcoming game Fable 2 but wasn't able to discuss it publicly so we all went "off the record" to hear it.

I can't divulge it obviously - but believe me when I say it's very very exciting.

Almost everyone agreed that the Wii had broken great new ground and was seen by many consumers as the true "next generation" console.

Neil Young of EA predicted a future where all game content was piped from a server owned by Google.

Raph Koster said the web was "kicking the ass" of consoles when it comes to game creativity

The rise of Facebook was much discussed, as was the need for the industry to learn from social networks and the web in iterating and learning from its customers more quickly.

And on it went.

I've written up a with one of the key points of the lunch. And I'll put down more here as I transcribe the encounter.

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