Wednesday 27 April 2011

Interation design

My o my how hardware has progressed over such a short period of time. Game controllers seem to be at a point now where they have been fine tuned. There seems to be a standard trend with layout. Its only really subtle changes to design that makes them distinguishable between consoles. But what seems to be the trend at the moment is everything seems to be getting smaller. To be fair Nintendo have been doing it for years with the game boy and consoles. Then we saw Sony doing "slim" versions of the play station. Just recently Microsoft seem to have jumped on the band wagon with the Xbox 360. The lifetime of consoles seems to have lasted longer since the Xbox 360 and the playstaiton 3. It seems that the whole industry is geared towards producing high end graphic devices for the handheld market. Graphics in games have come a long way in such a short amount of time but there seems to be a slow down just recently. Direct 11 didn't seem to show vast improvements. Well not yet anyway. But the likes of nvidia have been hard at work making high performance chips for devices such as tablets and Smartphone's. Game developers seem to be taking advantage of this opportunity. Recent update to the UDK enables developers to create game for the iphone with very little visual reduction in quality and you would expect to see on a pc or console. I expect this part of the market to boon within the next couple of years. And we may see consoles being replaced by portable all in one devices That can be hooked up to a TV. I pad to already had a very nice looking racing game that enables you to use the accelerometer in the device turning the ipad into a controller while it is hooked up to your TV and then displays information on the ipads screen such as the track position and current lap whilst the game itself is displayed on the TV. Sony Ericsson have just release the xsperia play. The first ever playstaiton certified android device. just like phones we have seen that have flip out keyboards. This device had a slide out controller and shoulder buttons. Let's hope people will have a large interest in having small devices as an all in one solution to technology. I for one would love to be able to play all my games on the so without having the need for a separate device for home and one for when I'm out o the house. I'm not exactly I big mobile gamer. I don't think my psp ever left the house but given the chance to have a dedicated gaming decide built into my phone would be very appealing to me and I assume it would to others. Provided there are enough decent games to play that is.

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