Interview – We are wrapping up our interview with EPIC Games CEO and Unreal creator Tim Sweeney today with an outlook into the future of video gaming. What will be the next generation of game consoles bring? What can we expect from the next Unreal game engine? What about all those fancy brain-computer-interface devices and future game controllers that will allow you to control your character in a game with your body, rather than with a controller in your hand? Join us listening to Sweeney’s answers to those questions and get insight in how video games will change over the course of the next four, five years.
Tim Sweeney, Part 1: "PCs are good for anything, just not games"
Tim Sweeney, Part 2: “DirectX 10 is the last relevant graphics API”
TG Daily: Throughout GDC, there have been several companies that were presenting game controllers that are so-called brain-computer interfaces. A while ago, I used OCZ's NIA device in Unreal Tournament 2004 and was blown away by the usability of that device. How do you see the interface between us, humans, and the computer evolving, given the fact that Nintendo has seen such a huge success with its Wii-mote?
Sweeney: I think the key challenge here is to look at all the cool things engineers are developing and identify which ones are just gimmicks, which ones are cool ideas that might benefit one part of the market, but aren't fundamental changes and which ones are things that really change the way we work with computing interfaces. I still think that motion controllers, such as the Wii controller, have a limited purpose, sort of a gimmicky thing. Standing there and holding a bunch of devices and moving them around wildly is great for party games, but I don't think that will fundamentally change the way people interact with computers. Humans are tactile beings, so things such as touchscreens fundamentally improve the user interface.
TG Daily: That brings us back to the iPhone, which we talked about earlier. Apple appears to have made a lot of progress in this area.
Sweeney: I agree. You are not just bringing up the map on the screen, but you move it with your fingers, you zoom in and zoom out. It's incredible that nobody thought of that earlier. With 3D editing tools, the touchscreen approach would be an excellent thing. You can grab vertices and drag them in different directions. A touchscreen could really improve and change things. I think that we might see that technology migrating to Maya. It is hard to tell how exactly that will pan out, but I see that as a very big improvement in computing versus the motion stuff. These are just neat toys.
The other big direction is head tracing - cameras built into consoles. They watch you and detect, for example, your arm movement. It is just more natural, because it is somewhat annoying to hold a bunch of wired plastic do-adds, wireless things you have to pick up and recharge them every once in a while. To me, it's more compelling to just use free-form movement and have computers recognize your gestures.
TG Daily: You mean behavior analysis?
Sweeney: Yes, but I do not know how that will work out. We humans don't have great motion control, when it comes to moving arms around in free space, while we have astonishing control over fine movement - when we touch an object, for example. If you look at people, what we are optimized for is manipulating objects. That is what separates us from animals: We can manipulate with toys and bulletins and interact with complicated objects. Anything that is useful in that space is going to give computers precise tactile feedback and enable us to be in touch with objects. That said, it is very hard to say how the user interface will evolve. I am not an expert in those areas.
TG Daily: At the end of the day, we all go back to basics at some point. According to one of those industry legends, Bill Gates and Microsoft engineers were roaming inside Apple, at a time when these two companies were friends. Gates asked Mac engineers how they managed to develop hardware to control the mouse movement. It turned out that Apple's engineers wrote software to control it. When we take a look at input devices of today, it seems that we are repeating the same thing what happened early 1980s.
Sweeney: Five years into development of personal computers we exhausted all the major ideas such as keyboard, mouse, joystick and gamepad. But then you see something like Apple’s multi-touch, or you see that YouTube video on a big screen based interface where people walk around and just start manipulating objects that are projected there. That is new stuff, that's entirely new. No one really has done that before and it is clear that there are still a lot of major ideas that haven't surfaced yet. Yet. As the technology improves, one thing is certain: As you increase complexity of the user interface, you need more processing power.
Read on the next page: The development of Unreal Engine 4 has begun