Devices and peripherals
- Definitely the coolest gadget I saw at the show were the 3D, surround sound gaming headphones from Psyko Audio out of Calgary. James, the Head Psyko, gave me a demo and it is really cool how, wearing these headphones and playing Call of Duty, you can tell where the enemy fire is coming from.
Here are some pics I snapped with my phone - they are cool-looking and thoughtfully designed, the second photo shows the ventilated ear cover
The other really cool peripheral I saw was from Spawn Labs, based in Austin. They've made a small hardware console (unit, STB???) that allows the gamer to play their console games from any PC anywhere.
Studios
- talked to the guys at Frozen Codebase - best booth at the show, IMHO, featuring looping video of the drummer chicken (actually the person drumming was in a rabbit suit, apparently couldn't find the chicken suit). And I kicked Norb's butt in Wii ping pong - the gran poo bah hat he was wearing might have had something to do with my success...
- I spent some time at the Intel Booth, but didn't win the netbook raffle :-(
Bob from Virtual Heroes gave me a demo of their Moon Base Alpha game which was developed for NASA to stimulate interest in the space program. It'll be available free on Steam in November. Bob also talked about how he used Intel's Graphics Performance Analyzer to quickly identify a bottleneck in the way a part of a scene was rendered. Was cool, and for $300 (free if you'll give Intel your email address) the price seemed right.
