With gamers still talking about the complete 180 Microsoft has taken with its next gen Xbox One console, Nvidia is making news in the portable games space today with its own next gen device. The technology giant has lowered the price of its Tegra 4-powered Project Shield portable gaming device by $50 to $300. The gaming system launches June 27.
The device debuted at CES in January and had a big display at both GDC and E3, allowing developers, analysts and journalists to get hands on with a full catalog of exclusively modified games designed for the console-like controllers and the 5-inch screen. The success of everything from the iPhone to the Samsung Galaxy tablets has revolved around touch-based gaming. Although there are new controller peripherals available for Android phones and now Apple devices, Nvidia has designed a gaming device with everything built-in running on its new Tegra 4 chip.
“You have to remember before things like Nvidia’s Project Shield all these mobile games were touch device games,” said Mark Rein, vice president of Epic Games. “It will take some time for developers to really embrace the idea of controller-based mobile gaming, but it’s a really fun experience and I hope to see a lot of great games for it.”
There are already multiple Unreal Engine 3 games running on Project Shield, including Real Boxing (which in my opinion stands up to the Fight Night console games) and Hawken (a very cool free-to-play Mech shooter).
Developer High Voltage Software is celebrating 20 years of game development. The majority of that time was spent working on console games. But the advent of powerful chips like NVIDIA Tegra 3 and Tegra 4 has opened up new opportunities for the San Francisco-based game studio. Eric Nofsinger of High Voltage Software, explains why his studio is now committed to mobile gaming in this exclusive interview.
Bill Wagner, chief production officer at Meteor Entertainment, said the interesting thing about Hawken is that way back when Adhesive Games was first thinking about the game, they were thinking about it as an Xbox 360 title. The game has always been able to run on a console controller.
“Right now it’s a free-to-play PC game and it’s played with a mouse and keyboard, but the truth is anybody could actually plug an Xbox 360 controller into their PC and play the game just fine,” said Wagner. “There isn’t a lot of difference in terms of gameplay between Project Shield and the PC version because it was already set up to run with a console controller.”
I’ve been able to get hands-on with multiple Project Shield games and the device is very comfortable in your hands and the games really stand out on the screen. The device gives Sony’s PS Vita a run for the money, especially given the mobile pricing for the games once you invest in the hardware. The lower price point is nice, but I think it probably needs to be shaved more to get more gamers on board. Expensive phones like the iPhone 5 and Galaxy S4 can get service subsidies to lower the price of hardware, which is something Nvidia doesn’t have the ability to do.
One of the cooler aspects of the Shield is the connected home experience that gamers who also own a GeForce GTX 650 or higher graphics card can experience. I’ve demoed this at E3 with Gearbox Software’s Borderlands 2 streaming straight from a PC to the Shield’s touch screen. Gamers can also connect the Shield to an HD TV via HDMI and see the full power of Tegra 4 on a very big screen. Many of these new portable games are getting to the quality of current gen games in my opinion.
Shield has attracted console and PC developers like High Voltage Software. Developer Eric Nofsinger said it was seamless to enhance the Wii game, The Conduit, and bring it to the portable device. They utilized the multi-core technology to up-rez the graphics, add more shader effects and improve the geometry of the sci-fi espionage shooter.
Not everyone is impressed with the device. Michael Pachter, video game analyst for Wedbush Securities, told me, “I don’t understand it at all and I don’t think there is a market for it. It reminds me of the Nokia N-Gage.”
I don’t see a correlation between the N-Gage, which was designed as a gaming phone, rather than a game system; and Project Shield, which is a pure gaming device. But everyone is allowed to have an opinion.
The price drop is a step in the right direction for Nvidia’s new foray into game hardware. The company is facing off, in a way, with Ouya, the $99 Android gaming device, as well as more high-priced gaming tablets from companies like Wikipad and Razer. And of course, all of these devices are competing with Nintendo’s portables and Sony PS Vita.
For this reason, Daniel Smalley, a graduate student at the school's Media Lab, used a much smaller crystal of material called lithium niobate and, just beneath the surface, created microscopic channels known as waveguides, which confine the light traveling through them. Onto each waveguide, he deposited a metal electrode capable of producing an acoustic wave.
Because each waveguide corresponds to one row of pixels in the final image, the waveguides with their individual electrodes can be packed mere micrometers apart from each other, unlike the Mark-II, which demanded the tellurium dioxide crystal be big enough that the acoustic waves producing the separate lines of the hologram were insulated from each other.
Beams of red, green and blue light are then sent down each waveguide in Smalley's device, and the frequencies of the acoustic wave passing through the crystal determine what colors pass through and what colors are filtered out. This way, combining, for example, red and blue to make purple doesn't require a separate waveguide for each color; rather, it only requires a difference acoustic-wave pattern.
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