Evolutions in Gaming

Game consoles are encroaching on PC territory, says Mark Claypool, associate professor in the computer science department at Wooster Polytechnic Institute. "Now they have hard drives, main memory, a programmable processor, a big graphics card, and networking." While game consoles aren't upgraded as often as PCs are-the last upgrades were four and five years ago-the most recent upgrades share the common denominator of "more": more power, better graphics, and more connections with other players. Last year's releases from the big three in gaming consoles-Microsoft's Xbox 360, Nintendo's Wii, and Sony's PlayStation 3-represent an evolution in both technology and purpose, expanding game play and its applications.     

The console market

The home-based video games market is one of the largest within the entertainment industry, and has recently begun to rival the music and film sectors in terms of audience, sales and revenue. This is partially due to the high profile mass marketing of games consoles and titles over the last decade, especially by a trio of Japanese electronics companies (Nintendo, Sega and Sony); however, it is also due to the increasing complexity, visual attractiveness and interactivity of contemporary video games.In this paper, we identify a number of characteristics pertaining to games consoles and game development. Following this, we examine the state of the console market as of the summer of 2001, focusing on the main manufacturers, their consoles, and how they may fare in the near future.     

Colour characterization of handheld game console displays

During recent years, research on colour vision has used traditional visual colorimeters, cathode ray tubes (CRT), and personal-computer controlled LCD-TFT screens to generate chromatic stimuli. We here explore the possibilities offered by a particular family of electronic devices whose use has lately been expanding rapidly, and which have one or more TFT screens and all the hardware needed for portable and autonomous use: handheld game consoles. We considered the different consoles available on the market, and as a result conducted an initial comparative study of two models – Sony PSP and Nintendo DS. As a result of this study, we checked the potential of using the Nintendo DS console, of which more than 100 million units have been sold worldwide. The results of our tests clearly indicated that it can be used as a tool in colour vision and physiological optics at the same technical level as CRT or TFT screens.     

Wi—Fi宽带无线的应用研究

Wi—Fi迅速席卷了笔记本电脑市场，目前己经向手机、游戏机等嵌入式领域发展，成为构建数字家庭和数字企业的主要无线技术。文中专门研究了Wi—Fi的应用情况，包括Wi—Fi的应用场景以及Wi—Fi的行业应用，旨在通过对Wi—Fi的市场和应用场景的研究，为中国乃至全球的宽带无线发展提供一些思路。     

The Future Arrives ... Finally

Just as cell phones will soon deliver TV programming and analog TVs will disappear, the PS3 represents another mutation in the evolution of entertainment: game consoles transformed into media centers. Whatever form they might take in 2009, these entertainment systems will be in a world strangely different from 1967, when consoles, the Internet, Wi-Fi, smart cards, DVDs, digital video recorders, MP3 players, and microprocessors had yet to be invented     

Exploring software piracy as a factor of video game console adoption

The market for video game consoles is substantial and competition is heated. At the same time, software piracy has seen substantial literature coverage. The hardware controls that ordinarily prevent illegally modified software can be bypassed. As part of an ongoing research project, this paper explores the role of software piracy in the decision to adopt a video game console. This work presents a new research direction, observing software piracy as a previously unforeseen driver of system adoption. This study explores a set of consumers with low disposable incomes, who must make a moral choice with regard to consumption for entertainment. The study used focus groups and a literature review to develop a set of factors based on the Theory of Planned Behaviour. These factors were operationalised in a survey of 150 young adults. Analysis was conducted on the basis of adoption level and gender. In contrast to much prior information systems research, the ability to pirate console software was significant for adopters and both genders, but not non-adopters. Cost was not a significant factor.     

Kinematics, Dynamics, Biomechanics: Evolution of Autonomy in Game Animation

The believeable portrayal of character performances is critical in engaging the immersed player in interactive entertainment. The story, the emotion and the relationship between the player and the world they are interacting within are hugely dependent on how appropriately the world's characters look, move and behave. We’re concerned here with the character's motion; with next generation game consoles like Xbox360 ^TM and Playstation®3 the graphical representation of characters will take a major step forward which places even more emphasis on the motion of the character. The behavior of the character is driven by story and design which are adapted to game context by the game's AI system. The motion of the characters populating the game's world, however, is evolving to an interesting blend of kinematics, dynamics, biomechanics and AI drivenmotion planning. Our goal here is to present the technologies involved in creating what are essentially character automata, emotionless and largely brainless character shells that nevertheless exhibit enough "behavior" to move as directed while adapting to the environment through sensing and actuating responses. This abstracts the complexities of low level motion control, dynamics, collision detection etc. and allows the game's artificial intelligence system to direct these characters at a higher level. While much research has already been conducted in this area and some great results have been published, we will present the particular issues that face game developers working on current and next generation consoles, and how these technologies may be integrated into game production pipelines so to facilitate the creation of character performances in games. The challenges posed by the limited memory and CPU bandwidth (though this is changing somewhat with next generation) and the challenges of integrating these solutions with current game design approaches leads to some interesting problems, some of which the industry has solutions for and some others which still remain largely unsolved.     

Evolution of unplanned coordination in a market selection game

This paper examines the evolution of unplanned coordination among independent agents in a market selection game, which is a noncooperative repeated game with many agents and several markets. Every agent is supposed to simultaneously choose a single market for maximizing its own payoff obtained by selling its product at the selected market. It is assumed that the market price is determined by the total supply of products. For example, if many agents choose a particular market, the market price at that market is low. The point of the market selection is to choose a market that is not chosen by many other agents. In this paper, game strategies are genetically updated by localized selection and mutation. A new strategy of an agent is probabilistically selected from its neighbors' strategies by the selection operation or randomly updated by the mutation operation. It is shown that the maximization of each agent's payoff leads to the unplanned coordination of the market selection where the undesired concentration of agents is avoided. The unplanned coordination is compared with the planned global coordination obtained by the maximization of the total payoff over all agents     

Locking Out the Investigator: The Need to Circumvent Security in Embedded Systems

ABSTRACT

Embedded devices are becoming ubiquitous in both domestic and commercial environments. Although smartphones, tablets, and video game consoles are all labeled by their primary function, most of these devices offer additional features and are capable of additional interactivity. Given the proprietary nature of such devices in terms of hardware and software and the protection mechanisms incorporated into these systems, it is and will continue to be extremely difficult to use “traditional digital forensics” methodologies to access storage media and acquire data for analysis. This paper examines how consumer law may be stifling research that the forensic community could ultimately depend upon to examine devices.     

Evaluation of learning outcomes using an educational iPhone game vs. traditional game

In this paper, we present an initial study to determine the subject preferences for educational computer games for children, in which 150 education professionals participated. From the results of this first study, we have developed an iPhone game for transmitting knowledge as part of multiculturalism, solidarity and tolerance following established learning theories, several design principles, and the objectives and competences of the Spanish law for primary education. We also report on a second study to determine whether the iPhone game has better learning outcomes than a traditional game by analyzing the participation of 84 children ranging in age from 8 to 10 years old. The frequency of playing with consoles or computer games was also taken into account in this second study, and the worldwide trend of previous studies has been corroborated. For learning outcomes, the results did not show significant differences between the two groups. However, 96% of the children indicated that they would like to play with the iPhone game again, and 90% indicated that they preferred the experience with the iPhone game over the traditional one. From these results, we can conclude that the children achieved similar knowledge improvements using both the autonomous game (iPhone game) and the custom, guided game (traditional game). This could facilitate versatility in the learning process since the learning activity could be performed at any place and time without requiring supervision. Therefore, it could be a useful tool in the learning process and help teachers to fulfill students' training needs.     

Computer business or monopoly?

Defines one of the principles governing the current transition from the post-industrial to the information society. The computer business is like one big Monopoly game with a global playing board. However, in place of the die and the Community Chest cards, the computer business game uses the scientific approach pioneered by Lanchester, Koopmans and Nobuo Taoka. The new Lanchester strategy is a method for out-guessing the Starbuck coffee-crazed marketers in Seattle. The next time you read about a merger between two fierce competitors in the computer industry, remember the Lanchester strategy and the rules of the game. The winner is the one that ends up with a 73% market share. Using other people's money to buy companies is perhaps the easiest way. But it all depends on where you want to go-up or down?     

Active blobs: region-based, deformable appearance models

A region-based approach to nonrigid motion tracking is described. Shape is defined in terms of a deformable triangular mesh that captures object shape plus a color texture map that captures object appearance. Photometric variations are also modeled. Nonrigid shape registration and motion tracking are achieved by posing the problem as an energy-based, robust minimization procedure. The approach provides robustness to occlusions, wrinkles, shadows, and specular highlights. The formulation is tailored to take advantage of texture mapping hardware available in many workstations, PCs, and game consoles. This enables nonrigid tracking at speeds approaching video rate.     

Evaluating digital entertainment system performance

Digital entertainment systems - which encompass a broad range of applications, including smart phones, set-top boxes, MP3 players, DVD players and recorders, game consoles, and digital cameras - have become the driving force behind the expansion of the semiconductor market, outstripping even PCs. Consider, for example, that in 2003, smartphones represented about 3 percent of the 500 million mobile phones sold worldwide, with analysts expecting them to grow at triple-digit year-over-year rates. Moving beyond the voice-centric model, more than half of the 600 million mobile phones sold in 2004 included a color display and digital camera. The implementation of more advanced features such as accelerated 2D and 3D graphics, videoconferencing, mobile multimedia, and games has raised the performance requirements of these model. The Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium's DENBench suite of digital media benchmarks provides a spectrum of tools for assessing and refining the video and audio performance of digital devices.     

Investigation on film cooling characteristics from a row of converging slot-holes on flat plate

Experimental and numerical researches were conducted to investigate the cooling performance of a single row of consoles (converging slot-hole) on a large-scale flat-plate model. The results show that the coolant flow from a row of consoles shows good lateral uniformity of adiabatic effectiveness, with regions of slightly enhanced cooling occurring between the consoles. For the console cooling geometry, the interaction between coolant jet from inclined console and the mainstream flow results in reasonable vo...     

Cournot games with linear regression expectations in oligopolistic markets

In this paper, a Cournot game in an oligopolistic market with incomplete information is considered. The market consists of some producers that compete for getting higher payoffs. For optimal decision making, each player needs to estimate its rivals’ behaviors. This estimation is carried out using linear regression and recursive weighted least-squares method. As the information of each player about its rivals increases during the game, its estimation of their reaction functions becomes more accurate. Here, it is shown that by choosing appropriate regressors for estimating the strategies of other players at each time-step of the market and using them for making the next step decision, the game will converge to its Nash equilibrium point. The simulation results for an oligopolistic market show the effectiveness of the proposed method.     

A sensor-based feet motion recognition of graphical user interface controls

Motion sensing has now become one of the crucial parts of modern life. The tech products for entertainment create huge competition in the modern market, with the front runners such as game and handset manufacturers. Users can use their own bodies to control the systems without Conversational User Interfaces (CUIs) and Graph User Interfaces (GUIs). With many benefits, the technologies of NUI is getting more and more important, which also are usually accompanied by the sensor developments. Hence, system designers uses the sensors on the embedded platforms used to develop the system devices for different body movement control interfaces, such as using the gravitational sensor to control the systems or using touchscreen detection. However most of the body movement is restricted to the hand portion for the system platform, making it not as dynamic as the traditional monitor consoles. Thus, this restriction decreases the multitude and availability of controlling modes in system devices. In this study, a sensor-based gait recognition was proposed, in order to provide a novel natural user interface for control systems except the operating modes of gesture.     

Vertical Navigation of Layout Adapted Web Documents

With the development of mobile devices, digital televisions and game consoles, a vast amount of different client terminals become capable to browse the Internet. Content providers have to find adaptation solutions to serve all devices at the same time. This paper introduces a dynamic layout adaptation algorithm for web documents and an eXtensible Markup Language (XML) that supports layout adaptation. The presented layout adaptation language is based on existing World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) specifications, i.e., XFrames and CSS. Adaptation might results in several pages within one document. There is a need for a navigation method for browsing such documents. Therefore, we introduce a navigation method that supports paging. An implementation of the adaptation algorithm and the navigation method is also discussed in this paper.     

Scanning backlight for motion‐blur reduction on mobile displays

Abstract— Small‐form‐factor liquid‐crystal displays (LCDs) are mainly used in mobile applications (e.g., mobile phones, PDAs, and portable game consoles) but also in digital still cameras, video cameras, automotive applications, etc. Like all active‐matrix LCDs, mobile displays suffer from motion blur caused by the sample‐and‐hold effect. One option for improving the motion portrayal on active‐matrix LCDs is the use of a scanning backlight, which results in an imaging behavior similar to the one present in impulsive displays. In this paper, the realization of a scanning backlight for mobile displays is reported. This employs a backlight with seven individually lit segments for reducing the motion blur. Results of perception experiments performed with two identical displays confirm the benefit of using this technology. Optimal driving conditions result in a major improvement in motion portrayal on mobile LCDs.     

Price Wall or War: The Pricing Strategies for Retailers

In this paper, we apply the game theory to study some strategic actions for retailers to fight a price war. We start by modeling a noncooperative pure pricing game among multiple competing retailers who sell a certain branded product under price-dependent stochastic demands. A unique Nash equilibrium is proven to exist under some mild conditions. We demonstrate mathematically the incentives for retailers to start a price war. Based on a strategic framework via the game theory, we illustrate the use of service level to build price walls which can prevent a huge drop in price, as well as profit. Three kinds of price walls are proposed, and the respective strengths and weaknesses have been studied. Analytical conditions, under which a price wall can effectively prevent big drops in both market share and profit, are developed. Aside from the proposed price walls, two other pricing strategies, which can lead to an all-win situation, are examined.      

A NEW AGENT MATCHING SCHEME USING AN ORDERED FUZZY SIMILARITY MEASURE AND GAME THEORY

In this paper, an agent matching method for bilateral contracts in a multi-agent market is proposed. Each agent has a hierarchical representation of its trading commodity attributes by a tree structure of fuzzy attributes. Using this structure, the similarity between the trees of each pair of buyer and seller is computed using a new ordered fuzzy similarity algorithm. Then, using the concept of Stackelberg equilibrium in a leader–follower game, matchmaking is performed among the sellers and buyers. The fuzzy similarities of each agent with others in its personal viewpoint have been used as its payoffs in a bimatrix game. Through a case study for bilateral contracts of energy, the capabilities of the proposed agent-based system are illustrated.