The Yi-Tan Tech Community Conference Call is put on by Jerry Michalski and Pip Colburn and talks about various subjects on technology. These are my notes from this week's call on the Nintendo Wii and the new nVidia GPU card.
Nicole Lazzaro - about the Wii - next gen console - control is better. Instead of graphics, they focused on a new input device. New types of gaming possible. Small remote controller - candy-bar remote controller. Accelerometer allows for tennis racket, fly a helicopter, swing a sword.
Breaking away from the rat-race of polygons and ray tracing, avoiding the complex world spaces - Wii is hoping to be a disruptive source - reframe what it means to be a quality game. Not as much reality, more as creating an interactive experience. By doing new stuff with the controller, had a Minority Report experience - drumming on virtual drums.
Controller does not have force feedback - but you can use your body to impact the gaming experience. Very different interaction.
Think about how "Dance, Dance Revolution" changed the interaction with the game. Graphics only goes so far. The Wii platform is ready to go to the next level of interaction. Wii controllers that is going to come out will be wireless (cordless).
Other uses outside of gaming - ten years from now? Games are always at the forefront (headups display, etcera). Will be a lot more gesturally sensitive ways of interacting with games.
Carl from nVidia - with the new offering, what makes this card a landmark? Integrating these things for HDTV/DVD/HiDef is becoming expected and needed. Much more realistic feel - but question is how much bandwidth is this going to take. GPUs are moving up to the processing power of the CPUs. Begins to migrate you away from the PC.
Will it impact the transfer to gaming platforms/stations? This offering is a step up - much better than what has happened in the past year. Will take an adoption curve - expensive, manufacturing, etcera. The bang for the capital equipment buck is not as good.
Accelerometer technology has been there for a while - and now people are using it because the components are to the level necessary.
Less rendered images allows us to place ourselves into the world versus the realistic method. Radio is a much clearer "picture" than television since it is the imagination that makes things happen.
AMD - CPU+GPU chip - with AMD having the memory controller on the processor, all the memory traffic gets caught going through the CPU. By integrating onto a single chip, AMD is able to avoid the bottleneck of hyper-transport. But will they have a higher complexity, which results in a lower yield? Moores Law should make this happen anyway.
Wii may be just an add-on - onto the Sony Playstation and then buy the Wii.
Playstation priced too high? Nicole suggests that maybe it is now into the entertainment budget and a game will be equivalent to the price of tickets.
New experiences are available now - take advantage of these new technologies...
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