At the Serious Games Summit beginning in
Washington D.C. on Monday of next week, the keynote speech will be given by Dr. David Warner, a neuroscientist and a
founder of MindTel, a technology company that presumably focuses on creating games for non-entertainment purposes.
In comments to ABC News ahead of his keynote speech, Warner points to one of the big flaws of games of all types: "From a progress point of view, we really don't stand much further than where we were [in] 1992 or 1993," he told ABC.
In a nutshell, his argument is this: the way we control our avatars in a virtual space is still very rudimentary compared to the way that we interact with the world in real life. Even as you read this web page, you're still feeling your hand on your mouse, you're hearing background noises, you're maybe even smelling the remains of lunch in the trash can by your desk. All of these sensory inputs create a rich interface to the world that games have not even begun to approximate.
He's right, of course. It'll be many years before we're anywhere near the immersive VR interfaces evoked in movies (Lawnmower Man) and television (The Holodeck). The Nintendo Revolution controller is at least a small attempt to try something different, but it still feels like a small step on the way to interfaces that approximate the sensory depth of the real world.
Grrr! What's it going to take to get a real revolution going on around here?
