Speaking of 3-D display technologies, at my last job at SEGA, my lab was in charge of coming up with many different and pioneering ideas for new ways to play video games, many of which, for one reason or another, never made it to market.
One of those was HOLO-GENESIS. It was a 3-D laser holographic projection device for the MegaDrive/geneis. It could have displayed 3-D rendered images, in full-color, in real-time, using a system of 3 red/green/blue lasers, and a finely-meshed micro-faceted surface which gave a pseudo 3-D effect based on carefully utilized light diffraction effects, a la printed holograms.
It was slated to come out in mid-1995, but at the time, we couldn't get a acceptable frame rate (3-D graphics accelerator hardware was still very primitive and expensive, the province of SGI workstations and arcade machines), so we decided to not commercialize it at the time.
I personally think that if the movie studios didn't tie everything down with their endless squabbling about DRM, we could and would have been enjoying VOD right now for a few years.
The technology is already there -- codecs like DiVX and its MPEG-4 based counsins can deliver near DVD quality video at bitrates around 1.5 Mbit/s, within range of most residential broadband technology. Server infrastructure, on the hardware and the OS side, has matured as well. With IP multicast, this could be even made more efficent. And all you really need on the client is a inexpensive box -- a current game console or TiVO could handle the decoding.
Sadly, it seems like the studios are holding it up, with their iron grip on content, not technology itself.
As someone born in India, educated in the US, and now working in Japan, I have extremely mixed views of the US. As someone who spent years in America as a student and a researcher, I am truly thankful for the opportunity that I had to be a part of the world's leader in science and technology, an environment that welcomes the world's best and contribute what I could to its intellectual and economic prowess.
Now, 20 years later, I probably would not have done the same were I in those shoes again. Such acts like the Patriot Act, detainings of people -- many times US Citizens themselves -- on the basis of race, under no basis for charge, new onerous immigration restrictions that make even getting a tourist visa about as easy as winning the lottery if one is unlucky enough to be from a country that's not western European, and other such hypocritical erosions of the consitution have turned me off.
Japan is not perfect, mind you. Its people still have a air of racial superiority about them left from their imperialist warmongering days, and discrimination in employment and all aspects of society is too often blatant for me and other people with too dark of a skin color. But even they don't think of us as criminals without a cause, which is what the US is doing. And I feel free to go about my work without fear that the police may be scrutinizing my every move, trying to "prove" my association with terrorist groups.
In short, I fear that Bush and Rumsfeld have done irreparable damage to the United States' image as a bastion of democracy and freedom in the world. Prior to the crackdowns on people in the US under the veil of 9/11, the erosion of the Consitution, and the invasion of Iraq, the United States held both the military power and the moral authority to enforce its opinions, a right it earned through decades of generally magnanimous acts in support of these causes around the world. Today, all this work has been laid to waste because of the shortsighted policies of George Bush and his advisors. The world views the United States, rightly so in my opinion, as hypocrites. It will take a long time (and most likely a new administration) to change that view for the better.
Nintendo currently has a contract with IBM to fab the processor (a PPC derivative) for the "Dolphin", aka GameCube and other future consoles. While I'm not privy to the details (not my department), I imagine the contract has some anti-compete clause for some time.
The original Metroid, released in 1987, was among the first major video games to feature a female protagonist. This was soon followed by Dokidoki Panic, released in the USA as Super Mario 2, which allowed you to play the role of Princess Toadstool.
Since then, Nintendo has continued to be a trailblazer for featuring females in prominent roles in games, and that is something I am quite proud of.
We've had such phones, and more importantly, the network infrastructure, in Japan for a year or two, and people actually use them. Network usage is cheap, so people do indeed use video and pictures as a primary form of messaging. In Japan, the phone, not the PC is the primary Internet access platform. We even designed our Gameboy Advance and SP to be compatible (in Japan only) with mobile phone hookups for online gaming.
Now the US is still playing catch up, and I'll bet US cell phone companies will charge you a arm and a leg, ensuring such features are relegated as a novelty for marketing or a small niche of people, like police or real estate work.
I only wish Japan was on the GSM standard, so that I could use my J-phone while overseas.
Sony has a nasty habit of exploiting other people's IPs. Nintendo had a nasty falling out with them over CD-ROM technology for the SFC/SNES -- Sony wanted to own all of it, and probably would have taken control our whole platform had Nintendo not decided enough is enough.
Fortunately, at Nintendo, all our franchises are developed in house, so we've no real risk of such publically embarassing spats.
It seems to me that the impact of the progressive scan will be limited for DVD playback only, at least for the time being. Games must be specially programmed to take advantage of the progressive scan, since you're now not interlacing anymore 60 FIELDS per second, but displaying 30 or 60 FRAMES a second, so it requires changes to the core rendering code of games itself. Even between normal NTSC and PAL, games must be recoded to account for frame timing differences, and I don't see how Sony can make progressive scan work on legacy games.
On the other hand, with GameCube, we have always supported progressive scan and other improved SDTV output modes as an option, and many games can actually take advantage of it right now with the right AV cables.
There needs to be a standard for uncompressed digital video, so devices such as video game consoles, or DVD players that play new compressed formats like this MS thing can output a direct digital stream to the TV, without having to convert to analog first. In other words, a consumer electronics version of DVI, or (HD) SDI.
Currently, all consumer digital video standards involve compression, which is the natural choice, if your source is already compressed, such as a DVD or satellite stream. BUT, if you're generating video/graphics on the fly -- OR as in the HD-DVD scenario, if you've already decompressed your video from some proprietary codec, it's senseless to (re)compress on the fly (introducing lossiness) and then decompress it again in the set.
Until such a AV interconnect standard is finalized, this MS DVD initiative will remain the province of PCs only, and those with non-PC based home theatre setups (read: the vast majority) will be left out.
Another key area is user control
on
10 Techno-Cool Cars
·
· Score: -1, Troll
This story neglects a key area of automotive technology which will see fundamental changes in the years ahead: the user control. Currently, little has changed since the invention of the automobile in terms of the steering wheel/accelerator/brake/shift user interface paradigm. This is cumbersome for people to learn, and severely restricts the usage of automobiles for those with disabilities.
Some members of my research group have been working with major Japanese automakers (whose identity I am not at liberty to discuss at the moment) to apply concepts learned in video game design to driving cars. Instead of a cumbersome set of multiple controls, we are experimenting with a single two-axis controller, one axis controlling acceleration and braking in the up-down direction, and the other controlling steering in the left-right direction. Gear shifting is mapped to the start and select buttons. We're experimenting with a number of control devices, from the Power Glove to GameCube controllers as input effectors.
We believe that this research will lead to much more drivable and intuitively controllable autos, especially for a generation of drivers raised on video games, and will cause fewer accidents on the road, due to the intuitive nature of the control mechanisms and the ingrained neurological psycho-response actuations which have developed from extensive game playing. It will further open up driving to those who may not have all limbs working, but as long as one has thumb control, driving will be accessible to all. I look forward to seeing this coming revolution on the commericial market.
We've actually ported Linux internally to the GameCube hardware, and it runs pretty well... but for high performance applications where both speed and memory are critical, such as game consoles, a monolithic kernel will not cut it. Many of the functions of Linux, such as multiprocess management, memory protection and the like are not necessary on a game console. We've done performance metrics, and we feel that a lightweight proprietary OS that is simply a lightweight hardware abstraction layer is still the way to go. Let the middleware companies such as NetImmerse and Intrinsic build on top of that.
We at Nintendo are very excited about this project, as you can imagine! I would, however, like to clear up a few things. While GBA can indeed be used as a PDA, or a music player or recorder, we are actually focusing on a specific application, and therefore have designed our initial feature set around it.
Specifically, having done extensive marketing studies within the Japanese and American markets, we've found that there exists a need for a portable pornography viewing device amongst our primary demographic of 15-29 year old males. After thinking about this, we decided that our Game Boy Advance would be the perfect vehicle for storing and viewing prurient images, video, and audio -- it's still a portable form factor, but not as small as one of the ultra-tiny J-phones, so you can still see an image big enough to whack off to. And it's not as big as a laptop either, which is much too big to lug around just for a quick porn fix.
Furthermore, the extremely limited viewing angle of the GBA's passive, non-backlit LCD, while normally a bane for gamers, allows the GBA to be used for viewing porn in public places such as trains, etc. where others may be offended if they see what you're seeing on your screen.
For all these reasons, and others, we are making pornography our primary initial, ahem, thrust for this accessory, and we will address other consumer applications later.
Working in Japan for one of XBOX's main competitors, the prevailing sentiment seems to be that XBOX's lackluster sales seem to be similar to those of American cars... big, bulky, typical of the American mindset that bigger is better. No one buys them (cars nor XBOX) in Japan because size is at a premium.
Whereas, with Nintendo, we have designed the GameCube from the ground up to reflect Japanese aesthetic sentiments of small size, symmetry, and fitting into the big picture without standing out, a fundamental tenet of Zen Buddhist philosophy.
Practically, the smaller profile allows GC to be used as a very compact embedded computer/processor unit in non-game applications. We have alreay begun some preliminary exploration with the Japanese Self Defence Forces on integrating GC into their Tomahawk missiles to provide enhanced imagery tracking, just like Iraq is using PS2 for their SCUDS.
Furthermore, and most excitingly, we have experimented with some preliminary projects on stacking the GC into clusters, allowing games to take advantage of more processing power as needed -- upgrading GCs for more memory and power will in the future be as seamless as putting LEGOs together.
We are continuing this trend with our future game consoles, and I would advise Microsoft to please to more serious market search if they wish to be a serious contender in the Japanese marketplace.
Before coming to Nintendo, I worked at SEGA for over 12 years as head of advanced R&D, and within the secretive confines of my labs, we explored several outlandish ideas that, for one reason or another, never made it to market.
The most notable was SMELL-O-VISION. This was an innovative accessory which connected to the modem port of your SEGA Genesis/MEGA DRIVE system! This device could synthesize almost any smell known to mankind (we identified a "basis set" of compounds that triggered various olfactory sensors in the nose, and by combining them in various proportions, we could emulate almost any smell), and would have greatly enhance YOUR enjoyment of SEGA with special SMELL-O-VISION software. The first software was slated to be LEISURE SUIT LARRY SMELL EDITION, by Sierra On Line. We were going to release it in late 1995, but we ran into problems with trials (some people had allergic reactions, no matter what compounds we tried, we couldn't find one that was harmelss for all). Also, Sierra Online had its own problems, and pulled out of the console games business entirely, so without our marquee title, management quietly canned it.
I was working for SEGA until 2001, when they decided to stop their hardware business and eliminated my division. Nintendo soon recruited me afterwards.
I'm sure you all know what Dance Dance Revolution is, the game that combines a dance pad with arrows on the screen that you dance to -- it's spread like wildfire, and even though it's only available for a competitor's platforms, I secretly admit to playing it to keep myself in shape.:) Some of you may also remember the old Nintendo Power Pad as well, even.
Anyhow, Nintendo is taking the integration of physical activity with video games to a whole new level... we're researching motion tracking in 3-D using purely computer vision techniques, and using no sensors worn on the body, like traditional mocap techniques require.
We've got some interesting preliminary prototypes of this technology, such as Swing Swing Revolution, like DDR, except you have to do swing moves, not merely hit the arrows with your feet, and Kung Fu Master, a remake of the venerable NES game, where you guessed it, need to do real punching and kicking.
We look forward to commercializing this and making Nintendo the first and foremost choice of overweight geeks everywhere!
We've done a lot of research into uses of Nintendo consoles other than gaming, such as using it as a inexpensive terminal for Internet access, or more compellingly, education, and we have done preliminary work with various Chinese governmental bodies and NGOs to make games such as Super Marx Brothers and The Legend of Deng Xiaoping to teach Chinese youth in new and engaging dynamic ways.
Using older game consoles such as N64 and even SNES/SFC enables schools, particularly in rural areas, to immediately gain the benefits of technology without the cost and maintainence expense associated with traditional PC platforms. We look forward to seeing the results of this experiment in China, and will likely expand to other developing countries if it goes well.
Hee hee... thank you for the vote of confidence. =) To the other responders who think that video games are not a source of innovation, it's getting to be less and less true as gaming becomes more advanced, and the gap between the first basic research and at which the technology becomes a mass consumer product is narrowing. I'm speaking personally as someone who has made the switch. Indeed, look at the other well-known research labs today: AT&T, IBM, Microsoft... they're the phone company, computer company, and software company. But yet, much basic science research goes on in those labs, even though the companies themselves are "application" companies.
And more and more SIGGRAPH papers these days are coming from game and other entertainment related companies, such as Nintendo, Sony, EA, nVidia, Microsoft, Pixar, and more and more academics are switching to industry. Trip Hawkins of EA was a theoretical physics person, as was Nathan Myhrvold of MSR.
Nothing wrong with that... a healthy partnership between academia and industry is what is very much responsible for the growth and pervasiveness of technology into our day to day lives today, and I for one look forward to it.
Blizzard still uses Solaris boxes for most of battle.net, not Linux (although they are slowly moving... but it's not exactly easy to just transition a live network instantly).
As someone who comes from a traditional academic background and now working in the game industry, I would like to say a few words.
Video games are becoming more "academic" as they become more complex, and games these days are a catalyst for continued innovation in areas such as graphics, AI, and physics simulation. Therefore, the intersection between video games and academia in general is growing all the more.
A traditional computer science/fine arts/film/music/etc. education to get the foundations of your chosen trade, be it programmer, artist, musician, etc. will serve you well compared to schools that just inject you with the latest "buzzwords" and techniques which will soon become obsolete as soon as the next big programming language/3D package/etc come out -- those schools to game industry what certifications like "MSCE" or "CNE" is to the IT industry: you can use your skills but don't expect them to last without additional training.
I am not criticizing gaming school as I am indeed aware that some of them do indeed have highly regarded programs that focus on the development of general technical and thinking skills, but do not think you MUST go to a "gaming" school to work in this industry, and if you choose to go that route, evaluate what they teach you very carefully.
There needs to be a standard for uncompressed digital video, so devices such as video game consoles can output a direct digital stream to the TV, without having to convert to analog first. In other words, a consumer electronics version of DVI, or (HD) SDI.
Currently, all consumer digital video standards involve compression, which is the natural choice, if your source is already compressed, such as a DVD or satellite stream. BUT, if you're generating video/graphics on the fly, such as in a video game, it's senseless to compress on the fly and then decompress it again in the set.
The major game console players, including Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft are trying to work with the electronics makers on an uncompressed consumer digital video interface.
Actually, much of EA's growth has been through acquisitions of companies such as Maxis, Origin, Westwood, etc, and putting them under the EA umbrella. For the most part, the various studios pretty much still are autonomous (ie, they're still geographically located where they used to be), and there is really little cooperation, at least from a technical/development perspective (there's lots of cross-marketing, though). There are, I admit, advantages, and disadvantages, but within the EA world, there are not too many cross-studio synergies as one might initially expect.
Many authors of scientific papers, at least in Physics, Math, and CS are making preprints available for free on arXiv.org. This is a great site, and as a fellow scientist, I for one would like to see more authors do this and make their knowledge accessible to those who don't want to feed greedy journal publishers.
He designs games that transcends not only age groups, as others have pointed out, but cultures and genders as well. His philosophy has always been to create games that sell well around the world, versus just selling to 18-25 year old white American males, for instance.
This is always what guides his designs, along with the de-emphasis on mere "kill as many living things as possible" that seems to pervade most of the current action genre games for other platforms. There is always an element of thinking involved and puzzle solving as well, not just reflexes.
I should note that Nintendo has dropped most of its previous censorship policies, and there is nothing to prevent a developer from making a Quake, Doom, GTA-type game on Gamecube. It just won't be from Miyamoto, and those that say he should make a more "mature" game haven't got the picture. It would be like saying author Stephen King is very talented, and that he should use his talents to write a children's book.
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Speaking of 3-D display technologies, at my last job at SEGA, my lab was in charge of coming up with many different and pioneering ideas for new ways to play video games, many of which, for one reason or another, never made it to market.
One of those was HOLO-GENESIS. It was a 3-D laser
holographic projection device for the MegaDrive/geneis. It could have displayed 3-D rendered images, in full-color, in real-time, using a system of 3 red/green/blue lasers, and a finely-meshed micro-faceted surface which gave a pseudo 3-D effect based on carefully utilized light diffraction effects, a la printed holograms.
It was slated to come out in mid-1995, but at the time, we couldn't get a acceptable frame rate (3-D graphics accelerator hardware was still very primitive and expensive, the province of SGI workstations and arcade machines), so we decided to not commercialize it at the time.
I personally think that if the movie studios didn't tie everything down with their endless squabbling about DRM, we could and would have been enjoying VOD right now for a few years.
The technology is already there -- codecs like DiVX and its MPEG-4 based counsins can deliver near DVD quality video at bitrates around 1.5 Mbit/s, within range of most residential broadband technology. Server infrastructure, on the hardware and the OS side, has matured as well. With IP multicast, this could be even made more efficent. And all you really need on the client is a inexpensive box -- a current game console or TiVO could handle the decoding.
Sadly, it seems like the studios are holding it up, with their iron grip on content, not technology itself.
Now, 20 years later, I probably would not have done the same were I in those shoes again. Such acts like the Patriot Act, detainings of people -- many times US Citizens themselves -- on the basis of race, under no basis for charge, new onerous immigration restrictions that make even getting a tourist visa about as easy as winning the lottery if one is unlucky enough to be from a country that's not western European, and other such hypocritical erosions of the consitution have turned me off.
Japan is not perfect, mind you. Its people still have a air of racial superiority about them left from their imperialist warmongering days, and discrimination in employment and all aspects of society is too often blatant for me and other people with too dark of a skin color. But even they don't think of us as criminals without a cause, which is what the US is doing. And I feel free to go about my work without fear that the police may be scrutinizing my every move, trying to "prove" my association with terrorist groups.
In short, I fear that Bush and Rumsfeld have done irreparable damage to the United States' image as a bastion of democracy and freedom in the world. Prior to the crackdowns on people in the US under the veil of 9/11, the erosion of the Consitution, and the invasion of Iraq, the United States held both the military power and the moral authority to enforce its opinions, a right it earned through decades of generally magnanimous acts in support of these causes around the world. Today, all this work has been laid to waste because of the shortsighted policies of George Bush and his advisors. The world views the United States, rightly so in my opinion, as hypocrites. It will take a long time (and most likely a new administration) to change that view for the better.
Nintendo currently has a contract with IBM to fab the processor (a PPC derivative) for the "Dolphin", aka GameCube and other future consoles. While I'm not privy to the details (not my department), I imagine the contract has some anti-compete clause for some time.
The original Metroid, released in 1987, was among the first major video games to feature a female protagonist. This was soon followed by Dokidoki Panic, released in the USA as Super Mario 2, which allowed you to play the role of Princess Toadstool.
Since then, Nintendo has continued to be a trailblazer for featuring females in prominent roles in games, and that is something I am quite proud of.
Now the US is still playing catch up, and I'll bet US cell phone companies will charge you a arm and a leg, ensuring such features are relegated as a novelty for marketing or a small niche of people, like police or real estate work.
I only wish Japan was on the GSM standard, so that I could use my J-phone while overseas.
Fortunately, at Nintendo, all our franchises are developed in house, so we've no real risk of such publically embarassing spats.
On the other hand, with GameCube, we have always supported progressive scan and other improved SDTV output modes as an option, and many games can actually take advantage of it right now with the right AV cables.
There needs to be a standard for uncompressed digital video, so devices such as video game consoles, or DVD players that play new compressed formats like this MS thing can output a direct digital stream to the TV, without having to convert to analog first. In other words, a consumer electronics version of DVI, or (HD) SDI.
Currently, all consumer digital video standards involve compression, which is the natural choice, if your source is already compressed, such as a DVD or satellite stream. BUT, if you're generating video/graphics on the fly -- OR as in the HD-DVD scenario, if you've already decompressed your video from some proprietary codec, it's senseless to (re)compress on the fly (introducing lossiness) and then decompress it again in the set.
Until such a AV interconnect standard is finalized, this MS DVD initiative will remain the province of PCs only, and those with non-PC based home theatre setups (read: the vast majority) will be left out.
This story neglects a key area of automotive technology which will see fundamental changes in the years ahead: the user control. Currently, little has changed since the invention of the automobile in terms of the steering wheel/accelerator/brake/shift user interface paradigm. This is cumbersome for people to learn, and severely restricts the usage of automobiles for those with disabilities.
Some members of my research group have been working with major Japanese automakers (whose identity I am not at liberty to discuss at the moment) to apply concepts learned in video game design to driving cars. Instead of a cumbersome set of multiple controls, we are experimenting with a single two-axis controller, one axis controlling acceleration and braking in the up-down direction, and the other controlling steering in the left-right direction. Gear shifting is mapped to the start and select buttons. We're experimenting with a number of control devices, from the Power Glove to GameCube controllers as input effectors.
We believe that this research will lead to much more drivable and intuitively controllable autos, especially for a generation of drivers raised on video games, and will cause fewer accidents on the road, due to the intuitive nature of the control mechanisms and the ingrained neurological psycho-response actuations which have developed from extensive game playing. It will further open up driving to those who may not have all limbs working, but as long as one has thumb control, driving will be accessible to all. I look forward to seeing this coming revolution on the commericial market.
We've actually ported Linux internally to the GameCube hardware, and it runs pretty well... but for high performance applications where both speed and memory are critical, such as game consoles, a monolithic kernel will not cut it. Many of the functions of Linux, such as multiprocess management, memory protection and the like are not necessary on a game console. We've done performance metrics, and we feel that a lightweight proprietary OS that is simply a lightweight hardware abstraction layer is still the way to go. Let the middleware companies such as NetImmerse and Intrinsic build on top of that.
We at Nintendo are very excited about this project, as you can imagine! I would, however, like to clear up a few things. While GBA can indeed be used as a PDA, or a music player or recorder, we are actually focusing on a specific application, and therefore have designed our initial feature set around it.
Specifically, having done extensive marketing studies within the Japanese and American markets, we've found that there exists a need for a portable pornography viewing device amongst our primary demographic of 15-29 year old males. After thinking about this, we decided that our Game Boy Advance would be the perfect vehicle for storing and viewing prurient images, video, and audio -- it's still a portable form factor, but not as small as one of the ultra-tiny J-phones, so you can still see an image big enough to whack off to. And it's not as big as a laptop either, which is much too big to lug around just for a quick porn fix.
Furthermore, the extremely limited viewing angle of the GBA's passive, non-backlit LCD, while normally a bane for gamers, allows the GBA to be used for viewing porn in public places such as trains, etc. where others may be offended if they see what you're seeing on your screen.
For all these reasons, and others, we are making pornography our primary initial, ahem, thrust for this accessory, and we will address other consumer applications later.
Working in Japan for one of XBOX's main competitors, the prevailing sentiment seems to be that XBOX's lackluster sales seem to be similar to those of American cars... big, bulky, typical of the American mindset that bigger is better. No one buys them (cars nor XBOX) in Japan because size is at a premium.
Whereas, with Nintendo, we have designed the GameCube from the ground up to reflect Japanese aesthetic sentiments of small size, symmetry, and fitting into the big picture without standing out, a fundamental tenet of Zen Buddhist philosophy.
Practically, the smaller profile allows GC to be used as a very compact embedded computer/processor unit in non-game applications. We have alreay begun some preliminary exploration with the Japanese Self Defence Forces on integrating GC into their Tomahawk missiles to provide enhanced imagery tracking, just like Iraq is using PS2 for their SCUDS.
Furthermore, and most excitingly, we have experimented with some preliminary projects on stacking the GC into clusters, allowing games to take advantage of more processing power as needed -- upgrading GCs for more memory and power will in the future be as seamless as putting LEGOs together.
We are continuing this trend with our future game consoles, and I would advise Microsoft to please to more serious market search if they wish to be a serious contender in the Japanese marketplace.
Before coming to Nintendo, I worked at SEGA for over 12 years as head of advanced R&D, and within the secretive confines of my labs, we explored several outlandish ideas that, for one reason or another, never made it to market.
The most notable was SMELL-O-VISION. This was an innovative accessory which connected to the modem port of your SEGA Genesis/MEGA DRIVE system! This device could synthesize almost any smell known
to mankind (we identified a "basis set" of compounds that triggered various olfactory sensors in the nose, and by combining them in various proportions, we could emulate almost any smell), and would have greatly enhance YOUR enjoyment of SEGA with special SMELL-O-VISION software. The first software was slated to be
LEISURE SUIT LARRY SMELL EDITION, by Sierra On Line. We were going to release it in late 1995, but we ran into problems with trials (some people had allergic reactions, no matter what compounds we tried, we couldn't find one that was harmelss for all). Also, Sierra Online had its own problems, and pulled out of the console games business entirely, so without our marquee title, management quietly canned it.
I was working for SEGA until 2001, when they decided to stop their hardware business and eliminated my division. Nintendo soon recruited me afterwards.
I'm sure you all know what Dance Dance Revolution is, the game that combines a dance pad with arrows on the screen that you dance to -- it's spread like wildfire, and even though it's only available for a competitor's platforms, I secretly admit to playing it to keep myself in shape. :) Some of you may also remember the old Nintendo Power Pad as well, even.
Anyhow, Nintendo is taking the integration of physical activity with video games to a whole new level... we're researching motion tracking in 3-D using purely computer vision techniques, and using no sensors worn on the body, like traditional mocap techniques require.
We've got some interesting preliminary prototypes of this technology, such as Swing Swing Revolution, like DDR, except you have to do swing moves, not merely hit the arrows with your feet, and Kung Fu Master, a remake of the venerable NES game, where you guessed it, need to do real punching and kicking.
We look forward to commercializing this and making Nintendo the first and foremost choice of overweight geeks everywhere!
Using older game consoles such as N64 and even SNES/SFC enables schools, particularly in rural areas, to immediately gain the benefits of technology without the cost and maintainence expense associated with traditional PC platforms. We look forward to seeing the results of this experiment in China, and will likely expand to other developing countries if it goes well.
Hee hee... thank you for the vote of confidence. =) To the other responders who think that video games are not a source of innovation, it's getting to be less and less true as gaming becomes more advanced, and the gap between the first basic research and at which the technology becomes a mass consumer product is narrowing. I'm speaking personally as someone who has made the switch. Indeed, look at the other well-known research labs today: AT&T, IBM, Microsoft... they're the phone company, computer company, and software company. But yet, much basic science research goes on in those labs, even though the companies themselves are "application" companies.
And more and more SIGGRAPH papers these days are coming from game and other entertainment related companies, such as Nintendo, Sony, EA, nVidia, Microsoft, Pixar, and more and more academics are switching to industry. Trip Hawkins of EA was a theoretical physics person, as was Nathan Myhrvold of MSR.
Nothing wrong with that... a healthy partnership between academia and industry is what is very much responsible for the growth and pervasiveness of technology into our day to day lives today, and I for one look forward to it.
Blizzard still uses Solaris boxes for most of battle.net, not Linux (although they are slowly moving... but it's not exactly easy to just transition a live network instantly).
/. may not be the best place after all.
So
As someone who comes from a traditional academic background and now working in the game industry, I would like to say a few words.
Video games are becoming more "academic" as they become more complex, and games these days are a catalyst for continued innovation in areas such as graphics, AI, and physics simulation. Therefore, the intersection between video games and academia in general is growing all the more.
A traditional computer science/fine arts/film/music/etc. education to get the foundations of your chosen trade, be it programmer, artist, musician, etc. will serve you well compared to schools that just inject you with the latest "buzzwords" and techniques which will soon become obsolete as soon as the next big programming language/3D package/etc come out -- those schools to game industry what certifications like "MSCE" or "CNE" is to the IT industry: you can use your skills but don't expect them to last without additional training.
I am not criticizing gaming school as I am indeed aware that some of them do indeed have highly regarded programs that focus on the development of general technical and thinking skills, but do not think you MUST go to a "gaming" school to work in this industry, and if you choose to go that route, evaluate what they teach you very carefully.
Me thinks that if current rates are in mSv/h, then cumulative doses should drop the temporal dimension, ie, mSv (no /h)!
There needs to be a standard for uncompressed digital video, so devices such as video game consoles can output a direct digital stream to the TV, without having to convert to analog first. In other words, a consumer electronics version of DVI, or (HD) SDI.
Currently, all consumer digital video standards involve compression, which is the natural choice, if your source is already compressed, such as a DVD or satellite stream. BUT, if you're generating video/graphics on the fly, such as in a video game, it's senseless to compress on the fly and then decompress it again in the set.
The major game console players, including Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft are trying to work with the electronics makers on an uncompressed consumer digital video interface.
Actually, much of EA's growth has been through acquisitions of companies such as Maxis, Origin, Westwood, etc, and putting them under the EA umbrella. For the most part, the various studios pretty much still are autonomous (ie, they're still geographically located where they used to be), and there is really little cooperation, at least from a technical/development perspective (there's lots of cross-marketing, though). There are, I admit, advantages, and disadvantages, but within the EA world, there are not too many cross-studio synergies as one might initially expect.
Many authors of scientific papers, at least in Physics, Math, and CS are making preprints available for free on arXiv.org. This is a great site, and as a fellow scientist, I for one would like to see more authors do this and make their knowledge accessible to those who don't want to feed greedy journal publishers.
He designs games that transcends not only age groups, as others have pointed out, but cultures and genders as well. His philosophy has always been to create games that sell well around the world, versus just selling to 18-25 year old white American males, for instance.
This is always what guides his designs, along with the de-emphasis on mere "kill as many living things as possible" that seems to pervade most of the current action genre games for other platforms. There is always an element of thinking involved and puzzle solving as well, not just reflexes.
I should note that Nintendo has dropped most of its previous censorship policies, and there is nothing to prevent a developer from making a Quake, Doom, GTA-type game on Gamecube. It just won't be from Miyamoto, and those that say he should make a more "mature" game haven't got the picture. It would be like saying author Stephen King is very talented, and that he should use his talents to write a children's book.