Gadgets

You step in the zone. You are in a jungle. You can hear sound of strange creatures around you. You draw your sword. The fun is to about to begin. There will be lots of hack and slashing. Your pulse is getting faster. Your senses are sharp and you are tense. From the corner of your eye you see some movement. This is it! You raise your sword, spin around, make a double duck move while pressing the button on the sword which makes you fly three times higher than normal and land behind the creature. Then, woosh, and its head rolls down … Wooh you have made it. You wipe your sweat off your forehead. Let’s move on.

An immersive 3D capture device can monitor your movements in the real world and map them to the virtual world you are interacting with.

Suppose you are driving and suddenly see a nice mountain far away in the background. You and your partner are curious to know what it is called. It stands out from the environment, so it must be well known. You both are now curious to know if it is worthy of a visit. But you want to make a decision before getting to the next junction, you probably have to turn at some point to get off your main route and go visit it. Your partner simply activates your Location Based Information Delivery Device and gets to annotate your environment with names. The device shows you the names of the main features of the environment overlaid on a 3D map of the world around you. You can then get extra information such as height of the mountain and its history (derived from sites such as Wikipedia). You can also get a list of businesses around the area to get a feel for what the place stands for. All of this takes places in a space of 45 seconds. You still have time to decide if you want to go and re-plan your journey to the new destination which is as easy as tapping on the mountain to get your route planner re-plan your journey.

This is not long term future. This is about to happen very soon. Such information delivery devices will become critical part of everyday life for many people, just as mobile phones have become today.

Imagine you live in a world that the concept of a screen no longer exists. You no longer need to have a fairly large gadget (like a TV) to view films or play games. Imagine when any wall can be a display and just about any device can produce a large screen for you on any wall you want. You no longer have to look at a tiny screen of a mobile phone and hope that you can actually read it. Your experience goes from ‘lean forward and squint’ to ‘sit back, watch and enjoy’, making your experience a lot richer and more rewarding.

You are walking around in the ruins trying to be careful not to create too much dust. After all, you don’t want to give your position away. The situation is critical. The enemy is coming towards you in droves and you need to get out of here to get yourself back to the base. You were part of an advance reconnaissance team on a top secret mission. The last thing you want is to let the enemy know you where here. It will lead to all sorts of political issues. You are wearing the latest gadget the military has acquired; the Invisible Cloak. It is almost a privilege to wear it. It effectively makes you transparent, much like the good old Predator movie. You can’t believe they actually made it. But here it is and you are wearing it. The module that comes with it is rather bulky, and makes you twice as large, but at least they won’t be able to see you …

Invisibility has been our dream for a long time and as demonstrated in many movies and work of fiction such as ‘The Invisible Man’ by H. G. Wells, it can be put to good use or it can be abused.

Finally, you swing around your axe, spin around yourself and bang. The monster is dead! Wooh! You are breathless. That required lots of complicated manoeuvres. You had to fight the monster five times before you could take it down. Your heart rate is up and you are panting. You need to rest a bit. This game is so cool. You drink some water. Right! You are ready for more. You resume your walk in the jungle. You hear some noises. Suddenly, you see two orcs approaching you from left. Ok, this time you need to kill them both at once…

Exergaming is a combination of exercising and gaming. The game creates an environment for you that is entertaining and motivates you do perform fitness-related exercises usually using dedicated hardware interfaces.