Virtual Reality will be coming to your favorite sofa sooner rather than later.
The annual CES show in Las Vegas, which covers all aspects of consumer electronics, had a large number of vendors demonstrating interactive wares. This included various motion-controlled headsets with hand controllers. The game portrays your character on the screen and mimics the player in actions such as ducking, head turning, and even tracking their hand controllers to the directions they were moving. This was all happening in real time. Some of the most well-known virtual reality gaming headsets include Sony's PlayStation VR and Oculus Rift.
For the PC gamer, Razer PC gaming introduced Project Ariana. This is a new gaming projector that utilizes Razer's Chroma system to bring the gamer more into the game itself. We had the privilege to experience a demo in their booth.
It started out like any traditional PC gamer may experience, or maybe an enhanced gamer, with a flat-panel TV on the wall and a desk for the PC. The player was playing a first-person shooter
game. They were moving around and doing what any gamer does. Then, they turned on the Chroma system bits at a time.
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First, they had the keyboard light up and give visual feedback of the game. If the gamer was hit, the keyboard lit up red. Moving by the water, the keyboard would start to turn blue; by a tree it
turned green. It was mimicking the colors on the monitor.
Next, they enabled ambient lighting. Here they had placed a number of color changing bulbs around the room that were connected to the Chroma system. Now, the entire room was mimicking the on screen adventure we were experiencing.
When danger was nearby, the room started to flash and light up with red. Traversing through the jungle, you were immersed in a room of greens. Next, the Arianna projector fired up. The projector is built to sense the wall that it is projected on, understanding furniture, and the location of your monitor. What it does is enhance the image of the game to cover the entire wall-essentially sucking you into the game itself. It's an immersive experience that grabbed the attention of technology writers and gamers.
"One of the more unusual concept pieces Razer has ever shown off at CES is Project Ariana, a high-concept projector that's designed to complement, not replace, your main display," CNET reported. "It combines an ultra-wide 155-degree fish-eye lens and a pair of 3D-sensing cameras to 'paint' some combination of in-game footage, related images (like weather effects) and colored lights, via Razer's Chroma lighting system, all in an effort to augment the onscreen game experience and make it feel all-enveloping."
Razer co-founder and CEO Min-Liang Tan stated in a press release the prototype system showcases the potential to bridge the gap between games and gamers, CNET reported.
"We've seen colored lights in many gaming laptops and desktops over the years, but the Chroma lighting system available in the Razer Blade line is the most impressive so far, so it'll be interesting to see it work hand-in-hand with different products in 2017," CNET reported.
And for the gamer on the go, Razer had another groundbreaking piece of tech-a laptop with three monitors. The laptop can fold up like any conventional laptop, but when it's time to play, the screens will be able to fold out to each side of the main screen to give the player a wider view of the action.
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"Project Valerie is the company's three-display gaming laptop which somehow packs three displays into a single laptop form factor," Forbes reported of the laptop with three monitors. "This prototype was made famous internationally in the last day of CES after it was reported that two of the prototypes were stolen from the show floor."
The article in Forbes noted While it remains to be seen if either prototype ever makes it to CES 2017 was a good sign of the health of the PC gaming industry.
"While the PC market continues to struggle in places, PC gaming continues to show strength. The commitment to new products and the introduction of new product lines with better designs and new features illustrate how much the market has grown since a few years ago."
