A look inside Edinburgh Interactive 2009
Friday 14th August 2009
Conference
The conference itself was held in the Baron Hall within the Corn Exchange complex (SW of Edinburgh town centre).
To begin Chris Deering, Chairman of Edinburgh Interactive (Chairman of Codemasters and former Chairman and President of Sony Computer Entertainment Europe), gave an introduction and welcomed back delegates from the first day's event. He talked about how today's event is a less-formal day with some interesting sessions.
The first session of the day was "Let Avatars Speak For Themselves" given by Rob Seaver (MD of Vivox) who detailed their massively scalable voice technology for games. He went on to discuss how the technology can benefit game play and communities who are used to more traditional textbased communication. He claimed that having voice technology within your game can result in up to four times the number of people playing and extend play up to twice as long.
The second session "Evolution of Branded Games" was given by Peter Cowley (MD of Digital Media, Endemol UK). Peter was initially cross-examined by founder and former TIGA CEO Fred Hasson. He then talked about using the digital media to either enhance or surpass the television media via games. One of their projects to look out for is 1 vs 100 on Xbox LIVE. Players can play virtually using their Xbox Avatars as one of the 100 in the Audience and one player who is trying to beat them to win real money prizes.
The last session I heard was "Improving the Multiplayer Experience through Social Technology" by Nate Jones (Corporate and Business Dev for Turbine). He mainly talked about how they see MMO's becoming the best of Virtual Worlds, Online Games and Social Networking by combining them into an 'Ultimate Community'. Watch out for LOTRO mini-games and integration with Facebook and Myspace.
In general it felt like a lot of people were thinking about the inter-connectedness of media types (internet, social web, games, television, virtual worlds) and trying to come up with ways to mix them together and earn from them. Interesting times ahead for the Games Industry, it seems.
Exhibition
Sony's EyePet
EyePet is a virtual pet that responds to your movements using the PLAYSTATION@Eye camera. The exhibit on the main stage was a demonstration of EyePet. The following pictures shows the virtual dog as it learns your drawing of a plane, re-creates it then turns it into a virtual plane that you can fly around.
Hand-drawn picture of a Plane being scanned by EyePet.
Picture of the Plane being re-created virtually by the Pet.
3D version of Plane with the Pet on top being flown around.
Nintendo's Wii Sports Resort Beach Party
Wii Sports Resort Beach Party is the latest offering based on the successful Wii Sports games. It comes bundled with the Wii MotionPlus peripheral and has lots of fun games included. On the stand they were running a Basketball competition to win some goodies.
Wii Sports Resort Beach Party Stand.
Basketball game being played as a competition at the event.
Also available to play at the exhibition was Mini Ninjas and Batman: Arkham Asylum. Both of these look great and all booths were consistently occupied by youngsters eager to play them as much as possible prior to thier release.
Realtime Worlds showed footage of their soon-to-be-released game APB which looks great and there was some other screenings that I didn't have time to view.
In the past, this event has shown off the current Dare to be Digital candidates, but this year they have their own conference; Dare ProtoPlay at the EICC.
In conclusion, although Edinburgh Interactive '09 was a fairly small event in comparison to some of it's big brothers like GDC or E3, even experienced games developers like me were able to gain some interesting insights into where the games industry may be heading. If you look beyond the commercial hype you can see many new innovations under development that will only benefit the games industry and the games it produces.
Neil Davidson has worked for 15 years in the games industry as a Software Engineer. In the past he has developed games on various platforms for different companies including Plane Crazy, Matt Hoffman's Pro BMX and The Ship. He is currently working for Edinburgh based company VEEMEE LLP.
