T Cubed: Portability, Immersion and Games at CES 2014 and Beyond

The annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is one of the only times each year where one gets a peek at some of the more experimental and untested technologies under development in the technology industry. There is always an overwhelming number of demos and products shown during the show, but an interesting trend among the more popular concepts demonstrated was the increasingly compact devices designed for newer applications in portable environments, which aim to expand our perspectives on how consumer electronics principles can be applied to other industries and new concepts.
One of the familiar portable technologies last year was the Pebble smartwatch, which gained popularity in 2012 after a successful Kickstarter campaign. This year, it was announced that it now has a new family member in the Pebble Steel, a smartwatch from Pebble designed to appeal better to traditional watch-wearers. The Pebble Steel has a traditional metallic watchband instead of the plastic one, and a metallic casing for the screen, which allows for potential use in more professional environments than the low-end model, while still retaining the same e-ink display, operating system, and battery to allow for easier app development. It has received some varied initial opinions, as the price tag is $100 more than the original model and some feel it is not yet competing with the quality of nicer wristwatches, but many feel it is a good start in beginning to develop smart watches that are attractive and fashionable.
Pebble was started by Waterloo graduate Eric Migicovsky (Systems Design ’09), and there was more Waterloo representation at CES as founders Stephen Lake and Aaron Grant (Mechatronics ’12) of Thalmic Labs were able to attend and demonstrate their Myo gesture control armband, which will be shipping its first round of units early this year. While much of the functionality has been previewed at previous events, the event gave Thalmic the opportunity to show their device directly to technology media outlets like Engadget, and had a demonstration available where attendees could control a hovering robot with the Myo in a controlled environment. It has been exciting to watch how the Myo develops over time, and see the rise of a homegrown startup.
Along with Myo, the other big immersive wearable technology covered at the show was Oculus’s new prototype of the Oculus Rift, named Crystal Cove, which received awards from many technology sites. The original Oculus Rift, a virtual reality headset shown last year at CES and released to developers, was an impressive demonstration of what was possible with virtual reality. It had limitations in that the view inside the headset had a mesh covering the screen, which took the viewer out of the intended immersion, and was hard to handle for long periods of time. In Crystal Cove, the meshing between elements of the screen has been diminished greatly, allowing for much greater immersion, and Oculus has attempted to reduce some of the blur when turning, so the view inside is easier to stomach over extended use. They have also added a position-tracking element to the headset, so that it can determine where your head is moving and reflect that in the environment. Interestingly, Oculus notes in an interview with The Verge that while gamepad use is the current method for moving in the environment, they are hoping to allow the user to move around within the environment using full-body gestures. Potentially a collaboration with Thalmic to use the Myo as the limb component of the Oculus Rift environment is something they could look into in the future to improve immersion in the headset further.
Oculus does have a new partnership with Valve, who showed off their highly-anticipated Steam Machines with their partners at the show, and is looking to disrupt the gaming PC market with their new controller-based living room computers. Valve has been starting to pump out a lot of hardware in the last few weeks, but rumours of a virtual-reality system from Valve were subsided with news that Valve was sharing the information they were researching with Oculus as part of a collaboration. On the Crystal Cove prototype, Valve specifically contributed some of their position-tracking information to the system, as part of a collaboration it hopes will make it simpler to support virtual-reality modes in PC games. There is already a mode in Steam that can be enabled for experimental purposes that supports the Oculus Rift, so the Oculus Rift may have some serious support. It would just remain for developers to support it apart from just Valve, which leaves it with questionable future support. Valve’s attempts to bring Steam to Mac, and now to Linux in preparation for SteamOS, have lacked much support outside of Valve’s own games, but Oculus might have a tighter following of gamers that could warrant the support of the headset in more games on Steam.
On Valve’s Steam Machines, many have commented that the new platform is primarily intended to compete with consoles. An alternative way to see Valve’s marketing position is as a way to convert gamers and developers to Linux (primarily SteamOS in this case) as a way for ensuring their own relevance. Microsoft and Apple have made inroads in encouraging their own gaming networks through Xbox Live and Game Center, and are hoping to push this further on their desktop operating systems after achieving some level of success on their other platforms. Gabe Newell, who leads Valve, has noted that the future of Steam is in SteamOS and Linux, but making a sudden shift to Linux may be challenging as developers won’t want to support a historically unpopular platform and gamers want to go where the games are. By focusing on the living room, they find another platform for gamers to play on that doesn’t replace their gaming PC yet, and PC gamers who don’t use consoles will be able to play something that fits closer to their ideal of a living room experience than those offered by Nintendo, Microsoft or Sony. One of the key features in the machines is to stream games from Windows installations of Steam to the console, which is targeted at those who already have Steam installed. As more gamers purchase Steam Machines, developers can justify porting their games to Linux, and as the game library starts to get more competitive, gamers may just switch to SteamOS for their desktop gaming PCs, helping Valve stay in the game.
It’s unlikely many of us will be able to see many of these technologies as they are all in fairly initial stages, but CES is always interesting for seeing what might be big in upcoming years. Our world could be a lot more portable and immersive very soon.