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Behind the Faked Revolution Video
1up.com has an interview with the guy who faked the beautiful Nintendo On video prior to this year's E3. The faked video raised quite a ruckus on message boards from here to fark. From the article: "The Nintendo community is famously excitable when dealing with leaks and rumors - the uproar over recent comments insinuating Revolution's downloadable classics would be free sent shockwaves - and this instance was really no different. Still, there were plenty of skeptics and cynics. To many, the presence of the esteemed Virtual Boy, the company's infamous portable blunder from the mid 90s, tipped the scales. 'The Virtual Boy isn't something Nintendo should ever use to promote a new revolutionary product,' said Jeffery Van Camp, editorial coordinator at Nintendo fan site N-Sider. Even the visionary behind Nintendo On admits 'Nintendo would never make another reference to a console that didn't comply with their expectations, but in this case, it wouldn't be a mistake, but a correction.'"
Man! That video was bad ASS! After watching that, I said I don't give a fuck if it's fake. I want a revolution now!
Music was fantastic. It wasn't lame like every other real nintendo Ad. It had style, pumps you up, it wasn't targeted toward 5 year olds. This deceptive marketing needs to be done more often. I was sold, and nintendo marketing need to sit in a classroom and learn from this artist.
Thinking about the Revolution is fun, but it also somewhat annoys me because everytime I see a Revolution story I spend hours trying to ponder what the revolutionary feature is going to be.
I understand Nintendo's fears that the other companies might try to rip off their ideas, but wouldn't patenting the hell out of everything be just as effective without driving all their potential customers absolutely insane?
Ah well, I guess it probably drums up some excitement. It doesn't really matter to me, I decided I'd be buing a Revolution as soon as I heard about it playing classic games. I'll probably get a PS3 too, but I doubt I'll get an XBOX360 though, if the current generation of games are any indication (and they very well might not be), XBOX seems to get the more mainstream games, which basically seems to me to be nothing but a crapstorm of FPS and Sports games, neither of wich I can stand.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
A headset with a gun-shaped controller, where player movement is on the gun and turning the camera is on a gyro attached to the head (along with a triangulated position reference to the console), is probably feasible, right?
Feasible, but laggy and expensive. Taking 20 MS for a character to respond to your input is basically imperceptable on a television, because, well, the rest of the world is whizzing by normally. But taking 20ms to updated a head-mounted VR system is nauseating, as the world drags behind where the world is supposed to be.
Likewise, the tech is pretty expensive. 640x480, when attached to your eyes is basically the highest grade consumer glasses you can get for a reasonable amount of money and yet is still really, really pixelated. For fully immersive VR with believeable resolution, the necessary pixel densities go way up.
So yes, possible. But not good enough to ship yet.
The ______ Agenda
The lowest maximum acceptable lag that I found was 20ms (ie 0-20ms is acceptable without making people sick). Other researchers found values between 40ms - 300ms! I think 300ms would be pretty bad, personally.
My thesis project only updated once a second (it used GPS data, which came out of the receiver at the rate of 1HZ), though, so the maximum latency was 1000ms. Surprisingly, it wasn't too bad. Of course, my display wasn't a totally immersive VR type system - it was more augmented reality - but none of my test subjects got sick. I'm not sure what the difference would've been if they could not reference the real world, or if the update rate between screen refreshes was different (say, the view updated 60 times a second, but with a 1 second delay between user movement and that movement being reflected on the screen).