This article was posted on 06/01/2012

Step up your game

How touch technology is changing the world of gaming

Evolving electronics and advancing technology are wonderful things and are the accelerants in unlocking new levels of gaming. Being a child of the 1980s, I watched the gaming market go from a simple mall arcade, to desktop computers, to the living room, to any room, and now to the ability to play a game between any and all of these devices.

Typical upgrades consisted of a simple hardware change about every five years. Now that new market players are implementing hardware upgrades every year, traditional gaming manufacturers have to “level up” by introducing new technologies to retain and attract more users

Fig.1: A decent facsimile of me playing games growing up.

There is a recursive parallel theme between picking traditional gaming platforms versus mobile platforms, which is integration versus distributed architectures. System designs generally are divided into two parts: embedded processing and analog components. An embedded processor like a Sitara ARM processor or ARM-based OMAP applications processor rests at the digital heart of a system. On the outside you have discrete analog components collecting and passing information down the line. However, where does one begin and the other end? This question is answered by the designer.

An embedded processor often has various levels of integrated analog solutions, which tend to be “good enough.” For example, an integrated A/D converter (ADC) that is just fast enough to sample data to get the job done and, reduces board space and cost, but may not be enough to sample high-quality audio. So you need to move that responsibility to a discrete ADC component, thus distributing your processing load across components in your system. This is the same for new cell phones and the tablet market versus traditional portable gaming products; do you have all your needs in one device or distribute your gaming to a dedicated device?

For a while, portable gaming technologies were simply running the course of hardware upgrades (faster processors, more RAM, etc.). But when cell phones and tablets started stealing away customers, greater levels of differentiation were required to maintain market share. A good example is the latest portable gaming platforms of Nintendo’s DS and Sony’s PSP products. The Nintendo DS introduced the idea of taking user interaction to new levels by progressively adding innovative features such as a digital stylus and a front-facing camera (two years before Xbox had the Kinect), and most recently a 3D screen.

Sony devices offered games and themes with a more serious flare, and introduced the PlayStation Portable in 2004. It had high-resolution graphics and processing power featuring movie playback capabilities. The PSVita boasts multi-touch capacitive touchscreens, a backside touchpad, as well as front and rear facing cameras. It also has optional 3G connectivity with Wi-Fi so you can leverage the entire PlayStation Network and play games with your friends remotely.

Still, unit sales in Table 1 show that, for a variety of gaming products, these innovations may be too little too late.

Table 1: Various gaming products with corresponding unit sales. Sources:• PlayStation Vita and PSP sales data: “PlayStation Vita global sales exceed 1.2 million units,” Gamespot, February 28, 2012• Nintendo Co., Ltd., Consolidated Sales Transition by Region, 1999–2011Innovation is still being usurped by the casual gamer’s option to use a mobile device, which usually is close by versus carrying an extra piece of hardware. Granted, owning a smartphone doesn’t exclude you from owning a gaming unit. But when you consider that Apple has almost doubled its quarterly units sold with each new version,[1] you see that traditional gaming manufacturers have to try harder.

Fig. 2: What will gaming technology of the future hold?

So what is coming next? Haptic vibrational feedback has been a part of gaming consoles with rumble packs, but tablets are starting to adopt it. This is seen with the first piezo haptic-enabled tablet, the Pantech Element. This cutting-edge technology is an example of how nontraditional gaming manufacturers are hot on the heels of traditional ones.

Next-generation haptics are now targeting multi-localization, where individual haptic responses are felt under specific points of contact, rather than throughout a device. Surface recreation, when you touch an image, feels as real as if touching sand or water, is another hot topic. Could haptics be the next field to explode in popularity? Regardless of what it is, I’m still trying to figure out how to beat Contra without the 50-life Konami cheat code. ■


1. Apple Data: iSuppli Mobile Handset Market Share through Q1 2011

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