GDC Expo Tech: Increasing the Immersion Factor @ Gaming Target

Written by Jason Cisarano on March 12, 2007

News: Bringing the Game off the Screen and into Your Home

A lot of gaming technologies promise to bring the player a more immersive experience. 3D surround sound envelops you and makes you feel like you're in the middle of the action. Bigscreen and widescreen monitors fill more of your field of view and help make the outside world disappear. Rumblepad controllers add a tactile experience and suggest the vibration of a vehicle or recoil of a weapon. Along these lines, several manufacturers at the GDC expo this year were showing products designed to bring your gaming experience off the screen and into your living room.

Philips was showing its new amBX technology, a system that could be described as a rumblepad for your room. The demo set up at the expo centered around the couch in a mock living room. Several lights positioned around the flat panel display bathed the room and painted the walls with light that extended the predominant on-screen colors, not unlike recent setups for certain plasma TVs. A fan set up on either side of the screen blew air at the viewer to convey a sense of motion. And a huge rumble setup shook the floor and couch to correspond with action on-screen. A smaller, but similar setup surrounded a desktop PC showing a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. demo. It's up to the individual gamer whether this sort of rig would be immersive or distracting, but it's slated for release in the next month or so and promises backwards compatibility for your older PC games, at least when it comes to the lighting.

On the other hand, there's TN Games's Forcewear, a vest that players can don during play to transfer the sensation of in-game strikes to the chest and back. It does this through eight pneumatic drivers positioned around the vest that УhitsФ the player with a ten pound force that corresponds to a hit in the game. So if your avatar is hit in the upper-left back, you feel a light strike in the upper left back. Ten pounds may sound like a lot, but allowing for the movement of the vest itself, the strike isn't much more than a tap on the shoulder. Beyond just increasing the immersion factor, the Forcewear vest could improve a player's game by helping identify a threat location in an FPS, for example. If you feel a strike to the top left rear, scan that direction for enemies. TN Games hasn't announced any games that support the system yet, nor have they announced a price range, but they have announced a November release date.

One other item isn't exactly about immersion, but better control. Sandiotech's 3D Game O' mouse allows players to control all movement with one hand while freeing up the other for easier use of hotkeys and so on. It does this by adding three joystick-like controls, one on each side of the mouse and one up top above the scroll wheel. Each one causes movement on a different axis, x, y, and z, and can be used independent of the normal mouse movement. So if you're playing an RPG, you can scroll around the map while still using the mouse pointer to select units and give orders. There's no need to mouse to the edge of the screen in order to move the map. Or in an FPS, you can give up using the WASD keys for movement: everything is done with the mouse while the left hand is free for weapon switching and text chat. Or, the player can continue using WASD while programming the mouse buttons for other features. The mouse is currently available for purchase, and its drivers support games like Rome: Total War, Half-Life 2 and Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.