Last night I attended the HP Gaming Summit, a press event in San Francisco for HP's new gaming business unit . I was there helping my friend and coworker show the Mscapes research project.
I love these things. They're exciting and fun. The venues are very classy and hip, the catered food is tasty, and the technology is cool. It's nice break from coding in my cell office at work. An interesting situation came up. I'm an avid reader of the Engadget blog and I knew that Ryan Block was supposed to be there, but I had no idea what he looked like. So I sent a text message to a friend and had him send me back a photo of him. Good thing too because Ryan was the first person to walk up to us.
 Rahul Sood, the founder of Voodoo PC gave the keynote at the event kickoff. You can read about the content of his talk in the various articles written about the event. What I like about Rahul is his style. How did Dean Takahashi say it in his article? "Sood hasn't really been indoctrinated in the HP Way yet". I remember the first time he came to Labs after the acquisition. He casually spoke to a room of suspicious researchers without a hint of intimidation. No notes, slides, management jargon, formality or BS. He told good stories and used the word "bad-ass" a lot (something you know if you read his blog). It's good to see someone who hasn't sacrificed his youth on alter of management.
One final comment. My favorite HP Labs demo at the event was Pluribus. It's difficult to fathom the size and brightness of this thing even when you stand in front of it. You almost have to go buy the biggest TV on the market and place it next to this display to see just how much bigger and brighter it is. It's like lighting up the entire wall, floor to ceiling, left to right, of your house with an HD TV. I was actually playing Call of Duty on this screen after hours one night when one of our coworkers had to get up to walk around in the middle of the game because he was getting motion sick. It's that awesome.
Here's a video I threw together from the event. Nothing fancy, but enough for you to get a feel for what it was like. Dean Takahashi is a much better writer than me, so you can read his descriptions of the projects below.
From San Jose Mercury by Dean Takahashi:
While HP didn't introduce any products, it did show off prototypes from HP Labs. The first example of this was Mscape, an entertainment system that included handheld devices of all kinds, global-positioning system, and clever image processing. In a video dubbed "Roku's Reward," the Mscape system showed how a kid could run around a real city and use his handheld to view imaginary images overlaid on the real landscape. The system could connect to real-life markers that the kid has to find, kind of like a geocaching treasure hunt.
HP also showed off Panoply, a curved screen that stitched together images from two different projectors. The screen can envelop the gamer's entire field of view, making it more immersive. I played Quake IV on the Panoply and it was absorbing. They also showed off a Panoply with a racing game chair that I tried out earlier this year at the Consumer Electronics Show. It's not clear to me how HP will be able to bring these devices down to mainstream prices, but Sood was confident that would happen.
Covering an entire wall was a projected image of Madden NFL for the Xbox 360. Measuring 13 feet wide and about ten feet high, the image was put together by aligning the images from twelve different $1,000 projectors. The result was a crisp image, limited only by the 720p resolution of the Xbox 360 game. Hp has been working on the project for a number of years, said researchers Niranjan Damera-Venkata and Nelson Chang. The cool thing here is that the projectors themselves can sharpen the picture because they can be aligned to eliminate the jaggies, or jagged lines. The researchers said there was no obstacle except content to creating ultra-sharp images on the walls with a resolution of 4,000 x 2,000 or something like that. That is far sharper than any of the high-end HDTVs on the market today. Now I could go for that.
Dubbed Pluribus, the large-scale projection system can be put together with cheap, off-the-shelf projectors. It may cost $12,000 for those projectors now, but that's a lot cheaper than a single, powerful $100,000 projector, they said. Both Pluribus and Panoply are spinoffs from HP's printing, display and Halo video conferencing businesses.
Lastly, HP showed off a Misto table, which is a coffee table with a display on top. It has a touch screen and can be used for casual game playing. HP showed off a screen saver with a koi pond video as well as a puzzle game that you played by touching the screen to move around puzzle pieces. It reminded me of what Nolan Bushnell has in mind for his Media Bistro entertainment restaurants for adults.
|
Printable version
