E3 Entertainment Technology Highlights
By Philip Lelyveld
The Oculus Rift fully immersive head mounted display was being demo'd with 3D games. In one game, trees attack you if you are not looking at them. This highlights the Oculus Rift's competitive strength of low latency. You can turn your head quickly and the image tracks with the motion sufficiently to not make you disoriented.
Zeiss was showing their latest version of the Cinemizer head mounted display. It uses a pair of 800X500 resolution OLED displays. The images look great. The glasses are easy to focus. The demo game responded well to rapid head movement. However, at a price point in the neighborhood of $700 - twice the price that Oculus Rift currently targets, a much narrower field of view, and without the Oculus Rift's community of developers creating games and applications, Zeiss faces an uphill battle marketing this hardware even though it can be used with many existing games as a peripheral device.
The Disney Infinity game environment integrates physical collectables with online creativity and gameplace. Kids can buy 3 kinds of objects, character action figures, power discs, and play set hexagons. Each object has an RF tag in it. When placed on the game pad, they activate the characters, powers, and play sets (ex. vehicles) in the game. Up to four kids can play at once in this child-safe walled garden online environment. A major selling point is that aside from normal gameplay, the gamers can build and manipulate the world and game that they are in. With the flip of a play set hexagon, one player can change the nature of the world for all the other players in their group. And like an organic tetras game, each person can change out objects and topography around the other players.
App Annie wants to be the Neilsen business intelligence source for the App community. Using proprietary resources and algorithms, they can provide market research data by type of App, individual App title, geographic region, and other parameters. (www.appannie.com/evolution)