Visual Cues and Bias Blindness

I happened across a link on CGTalk that took me to a machinima for Unreal Tournament 2007 (Link). Of course there’s been quite a lot of talk about Epic’s game engine(s) over the past year or so (you might recall my previous comment about it – reLink), so I had to take a look for myself.

I’ll confess that it’s not quite as nice as I’d hoped. The technology demos looked more impressive to me. However, that may be because I find the game design itself repetitious. All that computing power just to make another capture the flag. Once I get past that, I start thinking about what I always think about: convergence. To that end, let me show a couple screens and post links to some things that come to mind when I see what a videogame can now do.

ut2k7-00w.jpg

  • Interface design (reLink to previous entry)
  • Unmanned autonomous weapons platforms (reLink and recent news of pilotless F-35 JSF)
  • ut2k7-01w.jpg

  • Engineering simulation (rising awareness among the engineering community – Link)
  • Collaborative design using virtual worlds (reLink)
  • Games tools as design tools (reLink)
  • Game content as real product (reLink)
  • Real product as game content (reLink)
  • I’ll confess to not understanding how so many Industrial Designers can be blinded to the potentials of this technology. I don’t hear anyone discussing this stuff in the design community. I recently asked the designers on Core77 if any of them did any game design… y’know, for fun. Not a single positive response. Now that’s unreal.

    {Images source: Epic Games‘ video}