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The Future of Gaming Is In Sight
by Steven Kent for Gamers Today
Asked about what might come after Saturn in a 1995 interview, former Sega of America president Tom Kalinske took a moment to speculate on the future of video games. "You can only show so much on televisions as they stand now," said Kalinske. "Television technology will have to improve before they can handle anything more powerful than Saturn."
Kalinske was not entirely incorrect. Obviously Saturn did not take television technology to its extreme limits; but PlayStation2, with its 60 million raw polygons, 16 million polygons with effects like lighting and Bezier curved surfaces, comes pretty close. Even the resolution of DVD movies taxes standard television. So what will happen in the future when technology such as Midway's upcoming Zeus II arcade board, which is capable of generating up to 266 million polygons per second, is made available to consumers?
One answer is to eliminate screens altogether.
Tom Furness, the director of the Human Interface Technology Labs (HIT Lab) at the University of Washington, and one of the fathers of virtual reality, is currently working on a technology that projects images directly on to users' retinas rather than displaying them on to a screen. "I think it's going to be the future of all displays," says Furness. "Screens are a very poor way to deliver information data streams to the mind. We have this incredible capability in our eyes. The beauty of the VRD is that we don't need a screen. We actually scan images directly onto receptors in the retina and thereby create an IMAX theater and beyond in our brain."
Furness is not talking about the bulky helmets with head-mounted displays that became the symbol of the virtual reality of the early nineties. His new approach is built around a laser beam called a virtual retinal display (VRD) that paints images inside the user's eye. Amazingly, retinal images can even be seen by people who have been blinded by cataracts or advanced macular degeneration.
Furness's VRD is fairly simple to understand. Images are downloaded into a laser signal instead of a monitor. They are then projected in a thin straight laser beam. To see the images, you position your eye in the path of the beam.
I have used the VRD. At the invitation of Microvision, a Seattle-based firm that has licensed the HIT Lab's technology, I had the opportunity to try both monochrome and color units. Sticking your eye in front of a laser beam does not come naturally, but once you do an entirely new world opens up. Instead of seeing the blurry 170x100 resolution images I used to see in most virtual reality displays, Microvision's retinal display offered a very clear picture. This year the HIT Lab produced a VRD with 32-bit color and 800x600 resolution, matching the resolution of high-definition television.
The demonstration I saw, which was made before the high-definition television-quality display, included the opportunity to read the stock market page of the Wall Street Journal-one of the ultimate displays of fine detail.
Of course, as I said before, staring into a laser beam is not a natural human behavior. Neither are travelling across the sky in an airplane, standing in an elevator dangling 1,000 feet from the ground, or sitting in a car travelling at 65 miles per hour. People adjust. As to the dangers, Furness says that there is no danger of being irradiated by a VRD. "The kind of energy levels that are being used are the same kind of energy that you receive outside in the daylight."
(Maybe so, but I know that for a week after the demonstration, I panicked about cancer every time my head ached or my eyes itched. Still, no tumors were found.)
The big question is whether or not the price of building VRDs could ever be low enough to make them practical as a consumer technology. Furness says that the answer is yes. "I believe that you will be able to build these things for approximately $100. It really doesn't take rocket science to build it, and it gives you an immersive 3D experience."
