E3 is going on in Los Angeles, and the world's video game makers are showing off some very cool stuff. I watched a few videos from E3, and some of the things that have been created are mind-blowing.
Microsoft has been promoting their Xbox 360. It is supposed to take online gaming to a new level, with integrated online storefront, content creation, video chat, voice chat, wireless, and more.
I think enabling people to sell content they've created will open up a huge portal to the creative efforts of a diverse collection of gamers. This sort of thing has been done on PCs for a while, and it's nice to see it happen on a console.
The Xbox 360 can play music and video streamed from your PC, wirelessly. That is breaking new ground for a console system.
The graphics I saw were incredible. I am very eager to play games with full dynamic lighting and physics. I even have dreams about being inside a game, and the kind of graphics my dreaming brain produces are starting to become able to be rendered by a machine in real time, albeit not at quite the same resolution (how many pixels can someone imagine anyway?)
MicroSoft has said they are aiming for a billion people to use their new online network. That is an insanely powerful idea, it's like an Internet inside the Internet, with more of a human touch. I hope they reach their goal, but it seems unrealistic.
The Playstation 3 was also very amazing. Sony has revealed that the PS3 Cell Processor has 8 cores, each running at 3.2ghz. That is a lot more power than most computers have, which are just starting to come in dual core flavors. Imagine that a game system about the size of a DVD player can do more computing than the full blown computer you are using now. That is a testament of the game industry's power to innovate.
I hope IBM/Sony make cell processors available to PC manufacturers, which would seriously upset the AMD/Intel battle. It would be a great advancement to mankind, bringing powerful tools of creation, communication, and entertainment into homes around the world.
