Member Article

Future Of Tech Hold For The Gaming Industry

Current and future gaming technology is a world apart from the era of black and white games in the early 1970s and the first forays into 3D gaming a decade later. Advances such as VR (Virtual Reality), mobile and wearable tech including smartwatches, and the access to cheap and even free mass storage such as the cloud are making the gaming future highly interesting.

So, what should we look out for?

Virtual Reality (VR)

Not so new maybe, but as with developments in 3D gaming, cost has tended to hold developments back and keep this tech out of the hands of everyday gamers previously.

Headsets such as the Oculus Rift got people excited regarding VR in 2012, and Sony’s VR system for its PlayStation console have brought costs to manageable levels. Heavyweights such as Microsoft and even Facebook are getting in on the act with their Surround 360 and HoloLens headsets respectively.

The HoloLens in particular looks to merge the gamers’ digital and real worlds by projecting images onto everyday home surfaces such as walls, floors and worktops.

The new breed of more affordable headsets are set to twist the gamers’ experience of reality by not just using VR but, as Microsoft are showing, augmented reality (AR) too.

Eye tracking technology

Such is the pace of change, eye tracking technology may even usurp the still-innovative VR gaming experience. Using sensors mounted on a small camera bar, the console or computer tracks eye movements to provide an immersive game experience without the need to wear a headset.

The computer can understand where your attention’s going based on what you’re looking at on screen.

Cloud and on-demand gaming

By storing games on the cloud, it frees the need to create gaming systems with the powerful hardware required to accommodate their ever-increasing data needs. Games can be streamed to the player’s screen via the Internet.

With on-demand gaming, the ability to access and play them is similar to film streaming services; potentially offering gamers huge levels of variety and choice.

Mobile gaming

The increased size of smartphone screens, ever-more powerful models with higher resolution screens, and easier access to high speed mobile Internet through Wi-Fi and 4G networks, makes gaming on the move easier than ever.

It’s also likely to increase the number of gamers beyond just the hardcore fans as it makes access to games quick and easy. So while playing online bingo has been within the reach of mobile users for a while now, so too will resource-heavy games over and above Angry Birds before too long.

Wearable gaming

Going hand in hand with mobile gaming is wearable tech that isn’t as invasive as, say, wearing a large VR headset. With the popularity of existing wearable tech such as smartwatches and fitness applications comes the realisation that gaming could be incorporated into the ‘wearable’ mix, too.

Open source and game development

The plethora of cheap and homemade games available via the mobile market is a harbinger of the likelihood of an increased variety of inexpensive, or even free, games from many makers and not just a handful of major game developers.

For example, Ouya is a games console for the Android platform with the ethos that games should be cheap to buy and easy to build.

Overall

There’s no doubt it’s an exciting time to be a gamer as the technology is being pushed to the limit and is finally, in the case of VR, becoming more available as costs reduce to manageable levels.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Julia Writer .