What's the future of gaming?

I've had this nagging thought lately. Considering how far computers have come in the last 15-20 years, I wonder what will come in the next 20?
Of course it's purely speculative at this point, but what do you think?
I remember when graphics card makers included 3D glasses with their cards, will we see a return to it? True virtual reality?
It's hard to predict the future, but it's fun to speculate and I have to admit that I'm very excited for the future.

 

May God have mercy on the developer who tries to bring 3D/VR headsets back...I don't think there's any way to make those NOT induce eye-strain. I doubt we'll hit it in the next 20 years, but I'm sure the idea is to eventually reach "Holodeck" level immersion. Who knows, we may be playing fully interactive holographic games with neural interfaces within 20 years, but they probably won't be tactile

 

The future of Gaming will be to make the Gamers Sweat more while gaming so that they burn calories.

Lot of Gamers are dying these days while gaming.

Issues such as ' Deep Vein thrombosis' , Body Exhaustion, Cardiac arrest due to eating Pringles.

etc etc.


Hence, in future gaming will make you Sweat as much as your Player is experiencing in-Game.

For example: You ll have to actually Crouch To take a long distance shot, for Punching u ll have to actually Punch in the air.

I also think in future... maybe 2035... There will be Gaming Rooms.
You step inside & you are in a virtual Battlefield.

although such battlefields be at Gaming Arcades but later in 2060 people will all that in their homes.

The Guitar of GuitarRider will inspire models of Dynamic Rifles for playing on Large 40' inch TV's.

Its coming guys.... whether u like it or not.


And, these days i am feeling i ll be one of those people contributing to the gaming world..



Regards,

Tush-R a.k.a WaYne a.k.a nocTurnal

 

The near future of of gaming (next 10 years or so) will still involve playing on a 2D display/TV/monitor. We'll probably have moved past current 3D tech and use realtime raytracing when rendering a scene (round objects that are actually round, proper light modeling, etc)

I wouldn't be at all surprised if some company other than Nvidia or ATi/AMD becomes the premier "3D card" company with a new 3D raytracing card supplanting the current 3D add-on card market.

Most PCs will still use an x86 processor derivative as their CPU(s).

Graphically, games will not look like "real life" anytime soon---not within 30-40+ years, barring a new breakthrough in rendering. They'll more resemble movie CGI characters, effects, etc which themselves look fake even today.

 

..trying to hack today's games to run on the new 4D holographic processor...

 

actually i think we are pretty close to photograph quality images in game...

especially within 10 years...

i mean. comon.

1988:



1998:



2008:



10 years from now we won't have photograph quality? please. of course we will.

 

Good point, well put...

 

I`m guessing we`ll all be just brains with keyboards and mouses in a jar. Playing feed the duck VR.

 

I like your timeline master... Sometimes I just sit back and think how far we have come in gaming. It moved by so quickly and I am glad to be apart of this culture that is rapidly advancing in every day and creating a new medium where everyone can enjoyed.

O one more thing, 50 years from now I want to see a hollow deck in gaming.

 

VR Head Tracking is the future. Its not that far away. Just need people to start developing games. Check this video on VR Head Tracking using the "Wii"...thats right, the wii. It dosn't have any graphical horsepower in comparison to 360 or ps3, but its invative technology is going to be the future whether you like it or not. Thinks look so much better in virtual reality wii, than they ever will on 360 or ps3.


Say hello, to Alpha - Virtual Reality

 

You know what I want? Smell. That's the point where games become truely immersive. Smell can truly emphasize the horror of a situation, creating a more immersive environment.

Really, I think that the future will be more about making the gamer one with the game. Nintendo started this by making the Wii. But we still need to take in information from the game in other ways. Right now we only use our eyes and ears. What about touch, taste and smell? That's where it's gonna go. Eventually, but probably not anytime soon.

 

and i will still be playing aoe2. graphics.....meh, who gives a **** about graphics.

 

Graphics are the future! Imagine a 3D minesweeper, with immersive story line and dramatic voice acting!

Seriously though, 2D will still have its place in gaming.

 

no, gameplay will still have its place in gaming. if its only the graphics that change, than you are playing the same game that looks prettier. who really cares about prettiness, it doesn't make the game better or more fun.

 

If you google 'smellovision' and 'aromajet' you'll find there has been proposals to introduce this concept to video games. There was another method that was featured in one of the gaming magazines many years ago but the name of the product escapes me atm. It was some sort of monitor attachment with vials of esters.

Really tho', would you want to be subjected to the odors of a bathroom in a game like Duke Nukem or Doom 3? I'd pass thanks.

 

thats pretty neat

but, in my opinion... i dont see why we would want to play a video game that involves all the senses (ie. touch, smell). If you want to feel the pain from a bullet or something just go paintballing...

 

Masterchief341: Take a look at any pre-rendered CGI movie/cartoon released in the last decade or so. If rendering a movie takes the largest dev houses dozens, sometimes hundreds of hours PER FRAME and still looks fake as can be, we sure aren't gonna get it real-time @ 60fps any time soon.

Wait till we can achieve "reality" by pre-rendering (which hasn't happened) then add 10-20 years for computers to get fast enough to do it in X frames-per second instead of Y hours per frame. It's fairly east to get somewhat close to reality. It's unimaginably complex to get it so you can't tell the difference.

If you don't want to take my word for it, ask this question on a forum developers post on (like beyond3d) --see what they tell you.

 

IF technology keeps advancing the way it does, i would actually expect most of the ideas posted here to become reality in around 5 years, they may not be mainstream but they'll be there.

For example its possible right now to use VR goggles in a bubble, wearing a sensor suit that allows you to experience the game, you have jump, run, duck, shoot and whatever else. It's very possible, just expensive right now and will take a long time to go mainstream. And even longer to because viable while developers move over to using the code.

Personally I don't really want to see smells coming out of games, the sheer number of corpses, and the such like would put a few people off if they had to smell them.

I think the next huge step is 'living'(not really the right word) computers, using atoms or molecules to display binary, its been in development for a long time using things like purple dye (why i said living, wasn't really the right word), but when this breakthrough happens which is predicted within the next 15-20 years, computers potentially could be infinitely more powerful, since you can fit millions more molecules in a certain space, then you can a silicon chip. And cooling solutions would be almost null and void, since of the tiny amount of electricity required.

I think CG will become more realistic within the next 20 years, but, it takes a huge amount of hours to put the required detail in CG effects for things like movies, since they need to look real. You can make them look real, to a certain degree, but the more realistic you want to create them the amount of effort from a 3d developer has to be hugely increased, I find it quite boring mapping out 800-4000 polygon models for the source engine, cgi done for movies uses literally 10's of millions of polygons, though most is done by software packages. The most memorable thing that comes to mind is the second Pirates of the carribean, when jack becomes leader of the tribe, and they try to eat him. In the scene they are on bits of island 200ft above the sea, with sheer drops, it was filmed on a small hill about 10ft high, with a road running around the back, all the effects had to be added, and it would have taken months, and its still pretty obviously computer generated.

 

there won't be games in 20 years. Everyone will wear gray suites and listen to techno 24/7.

 

Another hippie era?

 

lol I sure would be scared of playing a highly hackable, modified game then. Who knows what kind of fart codes hackers insert into your games then..! Or what kind of putrid smells a game mod would offer.

I kinda like what the Wii started. I'd love to see how it'd be improved and developed on.

I know it's kinda common, silly, and/or plain unrealistic, but .hack-ish gaming is kinda what I'd love to see in the future. Minus the coma-inducing 'side effects' of course xD;

 

I don't like thinking about the future of gaming.. yes our processors and gpus will be insanely fast, but guess what? As hardware prices decrease, software prices will increase. We're already seeing it today as PS3 and Xbox 360 titles are $60. Game development prices are skyrocketing, and the new graphics technologies aren't helping. Graphics already look pretty awesome today, and I'm sure they'll get closer and closer to photo-realistic as time goes by. But the development costs for games using such technologies will be huge!

I can't really say where it's going to go.. but right now I'm sure A) games will cost more to make, costing us more to buy and B) games will be released less frequently, as a result of the crazy things they'll be putting in games.

 

Considering inflation, a $59 360/PS3 game is alot cheaper than a $49 Nintendo cartridge from 1988

 

Well, Nintendo games are still $50 each.

Seriously though, I'd seriously want smell. Add to the fear, the experience, the horror, the reality. Imagine playing something like Cooking Mama when uh oh! You smell something burning. Or perhaps you're supposed to cook something until it smells in a certain way. It's a long way till it happens, but I hope it does.

 

masterchef341, nice timeline, but can the Crysis one be spoilered or otherwise curtailed in width-wise? I'm getting 1280x800-is-too-small alarms here.

I don't want to imagine a 3D Minesweeper...it already looks and sounds worse in Vista than it did in Windows 95 with their "improvements".

 

Interesting replies. I never thought about having smell in games, not sure I'd want to. I guess I was thinking, of new interfaces, what graphics might be like, hoping for truly realistic ai. I imagine a fully immersive game, kind of like Second Life, but vastly expanded. True to life(TM) ai, many different functions, military operations, police patrol, a politician, an engineer.
What ever you want to be. That's what I dream of.
But the future, it's hard to predict I think how we'd interact with games and systems of the future, atleast far out.
@ masterchef341; I loved the original metal gear! The memories. Interesting timeline of how far we've come.

 

LOL good one.

 

Do we have to wear something in our nose so that we could smell in the game??

What kind of things do we have to wear from all this. Rubber suit for touch, goggles for eyes, something for the nose, sense surround speakers for realistic sounds

 

Or just wire up your brain to the gaming machine and you will literally be there? All -- graphics, sounds, smells, feelings fed directly to your brain! xD;

 

id have to disagree. As stated previously, games have come a long way in the past 20 years, but we have yet to see any noticable price change for games. So why would prices start rising now?

 

I want the holodeck!

 

That will be hard to imagine in the next few years but I don't really like the idea of putting microchips in our brains. (also if that happens it means the end of times is near)

Out of the topic
Where did you buy your dell?? From the States or in the Philippines?

 

Love the timeline. Yes we have moved tremendously over the past 2-3 decades.

http://www.tomshardware.com/2008/03/24/sun_laser_chips/

photonic cpu's in reserach today, could exist 10 years from now.

We're talking 1000x the cpu processing we have in current computers.

Imagine what could be done with that kind of power.

 

Mobile/handheld gaming devices that will let you play games with great gfx, great controls and let you connect with anyone, anywhere to play online.

Handheld gaming is a good 10-15 years behind console/PC gaming and I believe that gap will close (never completely) considerably in the next 10 years or so.

 

Yeah I don't know about that. For that to occur the computer technology would need to slow down and simultaneously continue to depreciate at its current rate. You essentially need mainstream computing to cost the price of technology from 10 years ago.

The target market for hand held gaming is children to early teens. Which means it has to be affordable since they don't have jobs and their parents are the ones flipping the bill.

I could definitely see devices that have incredible power and still be small and portable, but it'll cost a bloody fortune. The cost of miniaturization is steep, especially if you're trying to maintain the power of mainstream.

Take my laptop for instance. Fully loaded XPS M1730 valued at roughly $5000. You can get a desktop of equal quality and power for 2500-3000. You pay a steep premium for portability and miniaturization, and I can tell you right now this isn't an ideal laptop to be toting around.

 

the future of gaming is me playing aoe2 online without people on dialup holding the show up.

 

LOL. Or people downloading too much...stuff...that clogs their internet. Maybe some good QoS?

 

The day I have a brain that can get wired to the internet and play games virtually is the day gaming really changes for me, otherwise I foresee the shelf life of decent gaming laptops to shrink from 2+ years to a matter of months.

 

What if your brain overheats? you ll need a Zalman BC1000

P.S: BC for Brain Cooler

 

AHHHAHAHAHHAHA! Good one.

Also, you currently have 1,337 posts. CELEBRATE YOUR GAMERZKILZ!!! heh

 

Well they've got 3D TVs atm, but it'll be a while before its adapted into gaming.
The link is hither

 

Simple

1- 3D monitors (ALREADY being sold fyi, and holographic tv's... silicon valley has already TERMINATED its hologram research, hence holographic tv is here... just the industry wants us to buy buy buy so they can fuel the next research)

2- Mind control (already here just not for consumers... industry... needs more money from our pockets...)

3- Vitrual rooms as someone stated above... basically you walk around but you stay still (this has been done with a mesh like circular treadmill)

4- REAL feelings vibrations, shocks, etc... (Philips already has keyboards that vibrate and speakers with fans to simulate wind)


And apprt from that... in 10 years we will be playing Crysis like games on our phones... if not then in 20-25 years... but come on... PS1, PS2... PS3... 9800GX2 SLI running crysis at 1080P at very high... and that already looks pretty amazing...
I am sure the next technology will be so primitive it will be something along the lines of taking video or pictures and make them the map, so its like some form of bending them etc...
And of course, PURE REAL TIME...

 

By the time we wire ourselves to the internet with physical cables the only drawback will be your physical fitness and not artificial brain readings of the temperature.

Too bad GitS type cyberbrains are a couple of centuries away.

 

LOL!

By that time... we're definitly going to blow ourselves up

 

Either that or see our brains (and lives) fried because of offensive firewalls.

 

The sooner we can get to the Netforce(excellent books) level of VR the happier I'll be.

 

Laptops have already gone through this tranformation. It wasn't long ago that you could get anything but the basic integrated gfx chip. Now you can get cards that are not, visually all that much different from desk top cards. Sure 3dmarks can be tweaked to death, but visuals in games aren't that far apart anymore.

Also, you can get an 8600m GT system for a fraction of the cost of your high end laptop that does a very nice job and is no more expensive when compared to a desktop equivlant than a laptop with an integrated intel gfx solution.

Everything is going mobile these days and there are a lot of us old dudes who play games and don't do it more often on the go because the DS has good games, but is more for the kids and the PSP is a great piece of hardware, but extremely limited by its library.

When there is an offering with gfx smoewhere between Xbox and Xbox 360 on a handheld with a very good library of mature games (whether it comes from MS or Sony) I think a lot of us old guys will jump on it.

Theres pleanty of us that grew up around the Atari 2600 and the NES who would spend the cash on a capable handheld device, but the best current offering is the PSP and it struggles to reach gfx close to the PS2, lacks the capacity of the PS2 so games like GTA:SA can't be made on it and its library is lackluster.

Laptops can do things a Voodoo card with its own power supply couldn't dream of doing a decade or two ago, I think handhelds are due to close the gap a bit over the next decade.

Just my speculation though and in a decade you can come back and laugh at me if I'm wrong

 

Somebody mentioned Holodeck.
Spock,is that you?

 

I think the holodeck would keep people entertained and in shape. Instead of playing a game, sitting in a chair, live it. imagine the workout you would get running around city 17 being chased by combine soldiers.

 

Waterwizard11: That video looks AMAZING !!! And THATS the future, atleast I hope Its a suprisingly well recreation of real 3D Hell, just give VR Head Tracking and some PS3 graphics power