Near future tech and CoH

A little background info first: I'm the low guy in the IT department at work, but every once in a while, I'm allowed a peek into the minds at the conglomerate HQ IT level. It happened this week when my local IT management relayed a corporate discussion about the radical IT changes they anticipate in the workplace in the next 2 to 3 years. They are discussing the rapid migration to mobile technology, in specific tablet hardware and what little we've seen and heard on Windows 8 so far.

My senior boss, who can sometimes over-emphasize things, was speaking to the rapid decline of the keyboard, and the embracing of touch screen and even voice-activated technology. His stated goal is to rid the company of desktop pc's and keyboards, switching to tablets as soon as the market matches the company needs.

All that got me thinking, where does the rise of tablet and mobile technology put the MMO market, and specifically CoH for the not-too-distant future? Will tablets become the computer of choice for the game? Will tablets begin catering to gamers, putting gaming video cards into their devices? Will we ditch hardware keyboards and develop a CoH touch screen UI? How will that affect our style of playing (chat functions, response time, etc.)?

Personally, I detest touch screen technology with a passion. It's not comfortable for my hands, it leaves horrid smudged fingerprints all over the screen and I don't feel it's superior to a keyboard in any way. Tablet games made specifically for it, that's fine, I guess, but I still prefer a more traditional control scheme.

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Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Just wait until we get more stuff like this. That'll really make your head spin!

Your boss sounds like... well, amost every tech writer in the last year or so. "Tablet tablet tablet is the PC dead when will the PC go away tablet tablet tablet!"

Yeah... take a few tablets and calm down.

Basically, if I could, I'd have the people doing this work exclusively in a tablet for a month... and then say how much they want the PC, keyboards, etc. to go away. Tablets have their place, and they're an interesting form factor, yes. But that place is *alongside* a PC. It's certainly not "replacing" it.

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Voice recognition has been touted as the 'next big thing' off and on for decades. The simple fact is, it sucks. In CONTROLLED CONDITIONS (little or no background noise, limited vocabulary, trained to a specific user) it can excel and be extremely useful. Accordingly, it may have a future in video games for controlling the game mechanics since this has a limited number of options and a gamer would absolutely be willing to train the software to his/her voice. For recognizing speech on random topics, it doesn't cut it. Not yet and maybe not for many years.

Touchscreens can never replace keyboards (or some other type of dedicated controller) for the simple reason that they are FLAT. You can't look away and tell by touch what controls your fingers are on.

We already have these technologies in situations where you can't have a keyboard or other control device, like phones and tablets. This relates to why the desktop system with a big screen will never go away. Too many people need that additional functionality. We may get to the point where we have a supercomputer phone with voice recognition. And plenty of the users will plug it into a big screen and keyboard when they get home.

The keyboard and mouse have been apparently on the verge of death since they were invented, yet are still here.

Ultimately, touchscreens suck for many reasons:
1) They're hard work, you have to move your hands around much more than with a keyboard & mouse, depending on the size of the screen, especially if you do a lot of typing.
2) Your hands are often covering what you're trying to interact with, especially if you have big hands, which leads to...
3) You can't be anywhere near as precise as with a mouse, even with a stylus
4) No haptic feedback

Touchscreens have their place, just like voice control and things like Kinect, but as it stands, they're not even close to being able to replace a keyboard and mouse for general use.

Tablets are good for what they are good at. Currently that's a lot of media consumption and very little creation, beyond tweeting and updating your Facebook page.

The reason why they are taking off is simply because they are essentially smartphones with really big screens. Apple succeeded in training enough customers to deal with a touch screen device and got them accustomed to dealing with one foreground application at a time. Yes IOS is now more multitasking friendly with user apps but it still assumes that each app gets the full screen. And since everyone is modeling themselves after Apple, both the interface and full screen has become "the standard".

Will tablets eliminate all PCs? Did the Vespa eliminate Harleys? Of course not. Can the tablet make a noticeable dent in the market for laptops, netbooks and Grandma and Grandpa's PC? Sure.

Now that I've had more time to think, this topic kind of reminds me of MovieBob's video on why PC gaming is dead. For the disinterested among you, the video's drive is that the PC as we know it is dying because we no longer need a centralised location for our computing needs and that all of those needs will be split down to networked devices all throughout the house. The "family computer" would have no place in the future.

Ignoring the fact that the drive of technology is for one machine to do everything, rather than for you to have to own ten of the things, his belief that we'll type documents on the notebook, surf the web on our iphones, play games on our consoles and so forth is... Wishful thinking. First of all, I lack a TV that's appropriate for video games, and I'm sure as hell not going to fork over for one when I have a PC to maintain. Secondly, notebook computers suck. I HATE HATE HATE laptop-like keyboards and the small screen jams interfaces buttons together and makes me squint to see text more clearly. As for the iPhone, well, there's a whole site about texting with that thing and it has given me countless hours of gut-busting laughter.

I don't know if that makes me a knuckle-dragging luddite, but I don't have a smart phone of any kind (I have a regular cell phone), I don't have a touch pad, a notebook, a video game console, a TV set that's wider than the stretch of my arms and while I own a laptop, that's a relic from a time when I actually needed one. And whenever someone tells me I should buy one, my question is "Why?" My PC does everything, why would I want a whole bunch of gadgets to do LESS than it can? Why, as MovieBob puts it, would I want a wireless server in my basement for a zillion different devices to connect to when I already have one device which does everything? Why are people so keen on predicting the death of the PC and the introduction of about a dozen different smaller, more limited PCs? I will never understand that. I want my computers to do more things, not less.

As far as speech recognition goes, that's funny in its own way. First of all, I always, always, ALWAYS feel like a giant dunce whenever I have to speak with my PC, and not only because it rarely understands me. I'm not a native speaker of English. I have an accent. A rather coarse one. Machines have difficulty getting what I'm saying. It's twice as funny because I don't live alone, and I have to yell at my computer in a foreign language where others in the house can hear me.

Additionally, what, really, can I tell my computer to do that I can't more easily make it do with a keyboard and mouse? Or even just a mouse? If I were telling a person to do something, then yes, it would be easier to explain to that person than to physically hold his hand and direct him. But you can't "explain" to a computer. Voice recognition is just as basic a control scheme as pressing a button, and a lot of it actually revolves around telling the computer to "press <button>" or to "show mouse grid." Dictating text is hilariously impractical for speech recognition, and everything else ends up taking longer as you have to say more things, speak slower and saying things several times as the computer doesn't understand you. And you hope and pray you're not trying to talk to your computer where it can hear other people speaking.

The reports of the demise of the PC are greatly exaggerated. Yes, new devices are useful and they can accomplish some of its functions, but they strike me as the same kind of optimistic estimates back in the 90s when we thought shops would close down, people would live in virtual worlds and we'd have sex over the phone. That, and we'd all have video phones by the end of the decade. Sure, some of that may come true - I know Steam has replaced all my game shopping these days and a lot of cell phones ARE wired for video chat - but that's hardly around the corner.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

If you want an idea of how voice controlled games would end up...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knightmare

As much as I loved that show as a kid, it's not exactly where I want to see my games headed

No matter how much tech advances, it will always advance faster on a larger machine that produces more heat. The limitations on the desktop now have more to do with what people will pay and will accept in terms of size and inconvenience than with what is possible with current tech.

So, no matter what advances we make, compared to a desktop machine, a tablet will have worse graphics; be able to handle fewer objects onscreen at one time (see trial lag); have slower, less precise controls; will have fewer control options; and will have an overall smaller screen with less virtual real estate.

So, I think you can hold off on predictions of tablet CoH until the average player doesn't have a better video card he'd like to buy and we have 200 people fighting in a rikti raid with no lag. Until then, the desktop will lead the way in quality and the tablet will bring up the rear with "what's the bare minimum people will accept."

30-40 years?? So since 1971-1981. So since Apple IIs and TRS-80s roamed the Earth people have talked about PC killers. Heck the IBM PC only came out in 1981. The Altair 8080 was only 1975.

Fine I get the hyperbole but nobody seriously talked about PCs going away. PC gaming sure, after every console generation and we may be closer now simply because of the convergence of resolution between the computer monitor and HDTV.

I see the cloud as Jobs tells it as a fad, truth be told. Do people want their documents, all their documents, online? If you store your video online, you've then got to waste bandwidth to watch it. What of the security? What if the cloud provider thinks the content you have you shouldn't have and deletes it? What if your ISP goes down, or they suffer issues in their data centre where they're holding your data at that particular time?

You want cloud computing? Have your own home server, storing your data. Access it around your house via a properly secured wireless network (or wired network) or dial into it from outside and procure your documents from wherever in the world you may be. Do you really want to trust third parties to all that data, more than we already do?

As for a move to tablets, there's too many issues. From hardware to just human ability. Voice controls aren't great for those with heavy accents or dialects without long amounts of training. Battery life still has issues. Performance and heat issues. Ergonomics and interface problems. 2-3 years? Try more 20-30, maybe, at a push.

There will always be a market though for the home computer. And I think we'll be seeing keyboards and mice around for a long time, at least until we can jack in and just think at a computer to work it.