Wednesday evening I attended the first coming out party for HP and Voodoo PC. I don’t think anyone imagined what the combination of Voodoo and HP would create. Voodoo came in, took one look at HP’s labs and went insane. They started pillaging this massive repository of HP technology with the goal of doing something amazing and moving the gaming industry ahead 5 or 10 years in one big step; and they actually might do that.
What they showed us Wednesday night was long on concept and short on product. The products don’t start showing up until end of the year and much of what we saw in concept won’t show up until sometime later but I want to share with you what is coming.
Imagine very large, very bright gaming level displays projected panoramically in front of you so that you could be immersed in the game.
Imagine huge display tables equipped with sensors so you can do strategy games from a true god view and with the capability of multiple players all physically interacting with the same display real time, and then connected to other players around the world for massive strategy play.
Imagine the ability to take a handheld computer with a camera and overlay the real world with a virtual one, in effect allowing you two views, one natural and one through the window of the portable (think UMPC) that showed another dimension, one where other players (physically there) had full game powers and their full game persona. Want a UMPC now?
Imagine the capability for PCs and trading cards to interact both virtually and physically so that trading card games could be done seamlessly over a network or where the cards became the game controller and battles could be visually represented real time as opposed to simply imagined.
These are just a few of the things that are being imagined at HP, but no one else is doing this work and if they are successful, they could change the face of gaming and not only advance it by a decade or more but forever change its course. To quote an old movie line, HP’s gaming competitors should be afraid, they should be very afraid.
