What iPhone Means for Gaming?

[mikeyPotg]

Nice little article on Joystiq:
http://www.joystiq.com/2007/01/09/why-we-cant-wait-for-iphone-gaming/

One of the main things they point out are:
"Dual-touch: Imagine the Nintendo DS touch screen. Now stretch it out, design it for fingers instead of a stylus, and let it recognize two different inputs simultaneously. We can only imagine the gaming possibilities designers can create with this."

Dual touch would be reallly interesting for gaming if done well!

[T-Stex]

Dual touch would be reallly interesting for gaming if done well!

I think that about sums it up, for dual touch, as well as other ideas introduced with the iPhone. If done well, it could represent a great improvement upon current technologies. However, I feel like it will take one of the major brands (Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony) to truly get it right, and introduce it to a mainstream market. I think it will be quite a while before we see these technologies done well, but I'd love to be proven wrong on that.

[Chone]

My take on it is, well the multi touch interface is wicked awesome and a great idea for a mobile phone, a device which is usually cluttered with crappy controls unless it falls in the smarthphone area, phones which are ugly and aren't that much easier to use, they feel like palms with tacked on phone functionality or the other way around.

As far as gaming goes, some cool stuff can be created but you really do need another form of control on top of it all, the wii has buttons, an analog stick, etc, the DS has buttons, a d-pad, multi touch could work for many many many classic |mobile| games but not for anything thats really serious

But who knows.

[gkarris]

People are cringing at a $600 PS3, now a little phone?

Cingular hopes to gain $$$ from game downloads....

[GFLPraxis]

There are already $600 phones. Check HP's web site, they have two iPaq's at $599, and they are 802.11b!

I know someone who just bought a $599 PocketPC from Verizon.

[greatdevourer]

I can't imagine Apple letting anyone near multi-touch for a long long while, and even then at a price. As SJ said - it's patented to hell and back

[madog]

While the iPhone multi-touch is amazing technology, what impact it has on gaming doesn't excite me as much as what it means for the future of computing and basically our lives and the lives of our children [those bastards!]. They are going to see some pretty cool stuff....

youtube multi-touch vid (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-X_btCjGnPc)

2-player multi-touch, that's going to be sweet. :eek:


"When I was your age I had to use a keyboard and mouse and walk 10 miles to work through sleet and snow while barefoot..."

edit: Apple didn't invent this ;) [well, the vid posting says Nov., but I could have sworn I saw this before then. It made me think it had nothing to do with Apple, in which case they would have made it very clear or would have never shown this technology to anyone until the recent iPhone unveiling.]

lol, edited like five times and I don't think anyone has even read this thread since I posted. Well, I found the link to the one I saw posted in February of '06. I'm guessing a lot of people have seen this already but it's the same vid as the link above.

yup (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_mBjOmq1kY&mode=related&search=)

[GFLPraxis]

edit: Apple didn't invent this ;) [well, the vid posting says Nov., but I could have sworn I saw this before then. It made me think it had nothing to do with Apple, in which case they would have made it very clear or would have never shown this technology to anyone until the recent iPhone unveiling.]


Saw it a long time ago. They apparently work on a different basis though. Apple has nothing to do with the one you linked to.


Anyway, I wouldn't be at all surprised if Apple licensed it out to a gaming company like Nintendo, for a fee. As long as the device had no PDA-like functions that would compete with the iPhone.

[Grimace]

the whole point of patents is to license the technology or intellectual property for a fee.

Do you wonder why Atari and Sega are still around? ;)

[noneis]

During the keynote for the iPhone Steve put up a slide showing how much a few major industries gross every year. Did anyone else notice that the first one they used was "video game consoles"? If you take into account the iPhone and AppleTV as having been announced by the time he put that slide up, then Apple actually makes and sells something in every other industry they listed, including cameras with the 2mp one they put in the iPhone.

I don't think it was coincidence that they slipped that in there. Just a thought, but, turn it sideways and you have the home button on one side, and a proximity detector on the other that could very easily be leveraged into a button. Just tap it like you would the touch screen.

Anyone?

[After G]

I think the only games on the iPhone will be those dumb phone games. But they'll be so much better than regular phone games because you can actually interface with the elements of the game on screen. Sort of like the DS, but with one screen. I hope some DS game makers do some stuff on the iPhone.

[madog]

Anyway, I wouldn't be at all surprised if Apple licensed it out to a gaming company like Nintendo, for a fee. As long as the device had no PDA-like functions that would compete with the iPhone.

For the small price of, let's say, your soul?


I wouldn't be surprised if Apple held on to their multi-touch tech. only to have a company [like the ones who invented the tech. from that youtube video] sell it to anyone with a few thousand dollars laying around and flood the market with it within the next 10 years.

[takao]

actually even nintendo secured themselves some multi touch input methods through patents

in their case it was more about using two fingers to control an aircraft on screen or something like that

http://www.joystiq.com/2006/02/26/patent-application-reveals-nintendos-plan-for-multi-touch-capab/

actually i'm quite sure that apple only owns the patent rights to some special sort of multi touch panel ... after all they aren't the first to build them