Interactive Design

The game industry has got far with their technological improvement of interaction design. A thing simply overlooked years ago, now becoming more and more advanced.

We will soon live in a world where a lot of games will support oculus rift, a new technology of getting you immersed in inside a video game world, with ability to deliver a 3D image. But wait there is more, you can also get yourself Omni treadmill, which allows you technically move inside of the game using your own feet.  However those are most recent technologies, we don’t need to go far back to get to another break through, the Xbox kinetic, which although buggy at the launch, became massively popular, spreading not just through games but things like motion capture software.

There are new ideas everyday of to how improve user experience, to make the most comfortable and advance interactive technology.  But comfort and advancement are not always the same thing. Many new technologies such as recent virtual reality products like oculus rift and sony’s similar offering are suffering what can be called teething problems. Lots of developments in the virtual reality world are community driven and the industry as a whole is not ready to accept this new technology as standard. As well it has to be mentioned that new technologies that are trying to revolutionise the way we interact with games are often very expensive and cannot be purchased by a wide audience. 

Technology can open ways for many new people to experience games. Very recently the industry has gone through a large expansion from the mobile platform. There were always games for mobile devices such as snake, but only recently with touch screen controls can mobile games meet their potential. Touch screens usually use simple input devices such as swipes or taps which are easy for people to understand in order for them to play games. This has meant lots of new people can now experience games who would not have been able to before.

just like it takes a long time for technology to find a way to be accepted into the industry standard, it also takes a very long time for interaction technology to become refined until it meets its full potential. Just look at game controllers and how similar they are. Through history we have had many different styles and builds of controllers over the years, with lots of companies trying new things and often failing. Eventually we have a controller that has all the best elements of old designs, and the product of this evolution is a comfortable input experience. Of course innovation is exciting, but sometimes it is not needed. I think that sometimes the industry tries to fix what is not broken or push technology that might not be ready to be sold. An example is the PlayStation eye that came on the PlayStation 2. It was very gimmicky, and did not meet potential unlike the refined version- the Kinect for Xbox 360.