I think that in the next generation we are going to start seeing some massive, massive differences in terms of appearance between low-budget and high-budget games. Pushing those bad boys to the limit is going to ruin people's spaghetti, it will.

For next gen i'm expectn wii hd to be on par with xbox 360 and ps3. the next xbox and playstation might be slightly more powerfull but dont expect the substantial tech upgrade probably a focus on more features. A too high of a jump in the next gen console will probably come close to killing of the gaming industry as the price to develop would be insanely high and the ROI would not be able to keep up.

 Developers are struggling to contain cost with this gen, sure.    However, massive power will help bring down cost too.  Because current gen systems don't have enough power, developer spend a huge amount of time in the research and optimising phase.  Just look at FFXIII and GT5.  If Square Enix  had a much more powerful system to work with, they would have finished FFXIII  several years ago.  Same thing with Kill Zone 2.  KZ2 developer struggled to code the game to the level of the intial CG trailer.  It took them more than 4 year!  If they had a much more powerful system, KZ2 would probably be done in half the time.

I want to see developers have machines so powerful, they think they have infinity!   systems so powerful that even the most tangled of spaghetti codes will not affect game play frame rates.   And no amount of special effect will slow the game down.   If everyone is just making a slightly more powerful system, developer will be in the same situation that is bound by their ambition.  They will still be spending more than half of their time optimising codes and art!  

@ theword: If a console was as powerful as that then the devs would feel compelled to use all the power or as uch as they could so the competition of graphics between games and hence massive costs would still be there..

Also the fact is that the console would be very expensive and graphics really aren't that important, there has to be a balance of features...

@puffy

The competition is there regardless of system power.  The larger companies will alway try to standout by leveraging their engineering and art advantage.    What was considered difficult to do with older systems are now a piece of cake on this generation.  Take for example Banjo on the N64.  It was considered state of the art game for its time.  Now brought to Live Arcade, it is still a classic but I don't think Rare even broke a sweat coding it like they did with the N64.    Keep in mind also, more powerful systems will also allow for more powerful and easier to use tool, just because the systems can handle it.

The smaller developers will continue to make small budget games that are fun to play.  Braid, World of Goo, ... can probably be done on the PS1.  Yet here they are thriving on systems a hundred times more powerful just fine.  

Graphics will come to a point where it is indistinguisable from real life films.  And a lot of real life films now are CGs, so I don't see why someday consoles can achieve this level of detail in real time.   But is looking like real life enough?  No, the world has to behave just like one, and this bring other elements such as physics, AI into play.    Take Fable II for example.  This is a game where it is much more than just graphics.  Yet, as good as Fable II is, a lot of concession had to be made to make the game with existing technology.  I will bet that if you give Peter Molynaux a system 100 times more powerful, he will first tell you he does not know what to do with it. But in a few years time, he will come back and tell you that he need more power for the ideas he has in Fable V.

You're right! A system with this much power now is,  priceless!  Or more correctly no money can buy such system in the consumer space, as the technology is not there except perhaps in the supercomputer realm. 

I have been giving a lot of thought trying to imagine exactly what Nintendo would do next. Last time they told everyone what they were up to, only nobody listened.

Hints: Iwata and Miyamoto have both made some enigmatic statements that indicated that it would be HD but not about HD. Malstrom seemed to have some inside information about something "that you already have in your Wii but don't know about. But nothing came of it. Also the idea that the Wii 2 would have to disrupt the current one seemed accepted."

 I think they are waiting for the CPU/GPU Fusion, NVIDIA GPU parallel processing, Open GL whatever but it will be some sort of GPU centric highly integrated system on a chip. But even though they would have power, they seemed in no rush to commit fully to digital TV.

Some design features struck me as odd. Like why have the IR sources in the bar and have the triangulation done by the Wiimote? The other way around is how it's usually done and cheaper and easier.

Then suddenly it all came together. I think I know what Nintendo's next great disruption will be. It's not about HD, it's about 3-D.

3-D video is nothing new, Imax theaters have had it using polarized glasses. There are the funny glasses with two little screens. There are red green glasses. And if your pockets are deep enough you can buy large 3-D monitor's that use rectilinear lenses etc. say for $12K or so. All of these methods use dual video inputs to simplify the equipment on the user. In a theater you have an expensive dual projector so that you only need cheap polarized glasses on the audience. People just shelled out for big TVs, they're not going to want to buy another more expensive set or worse yet,two sets.

There is another way that uses standard televisions and I have used it. I worked with 3-D television when I was working on some stories for National Geographic. They had 3-D video of the Titanic and they were going to show it at the Explorer's Club. Very exclusive, Prince Charles (a member) was the guest speaker as I recall. The video was shot from an expedition getting Imax film.

I was in a friends office and the video was playing on a standard monitor in 2-D but I'm a Titanic nut so I watched. My friend Pete returned and walked up and handed me a pair of glasses with a wire and told me to put them on. Instantly the wreck acquired depth and the long white tails of the rat tailed fish whipped right out of the screen. It was some of the best 3-D I had ever seen.

The system worked using a standard interlaced video signal. Those are the standards that end in "i" such as 720i as opposed to "p" such as 1080p for progressive. Progressive scan does the entire image before refreshing so it has to do it faster. All television used to use interlace although it's falling from favor. In interlaced video, every other line was scanned on one pass and then the interlaced lines on the next. It was originally intended to cut the time in half between at least partial refresh times.

There were other ways to use the interlace however. In this 3-D system the signal from two different cameras were merged, one camera for the each half of the interlace. The glasses were LCD shutters that could open and close at video rate.  When the left hand camera scan was displayed your left eye was uncovered and vice versa. The shutter was too fast to be seen, you just saw the resulting 3-D. It worked great, the image quality and 3-D were fantastic although you lost brightness from one eye always being covered. The glasses were synchronized to the video with the wire and at the time the glasses were almost $1000 a pair so it was not a home device.

I looked up on the Internet to see where that technology is today and up pops a system with two pair of glasses and controller for <$99. But no more wires to tangle up, the glasses are synchronized through an IR signal. Technologically this is a piece of cake, you could buy the kit and do it yourself except the games aren't done in 3-D.

I realized that this was not a major challenge. Video games are used to supplying first person viewpoint cameras and having two in tandem would be no more difficult that writing a game with two camera co-op. It could even be turned on and off in a game like split screen. You could play the game either way.

Of course with a standard game and controller it would hardly be more than a novelty. To make it fantastic you'd have to have 3-D motion tracking. In fact for sword fights and the like, it would have to be real time 1:1 motion tracking. Too bad that doesn't exist... Oh wait, isn't that Motion Plus?

Take motion plus which gives you accurate 3-D motion, add this to a box putting out 1080i or 720i (it of course won't work on progressive scan) and virtual reality 3-D gaming is here. Holy sheepdip Batman, all they were lacking was true 3-D control. With motion plus they have it. Iwata said the Wii2 wasn't going to be just HD. He's not kidding.

If I thought of this, you reckon they have? Of course they have.  Oh man, Nintendo rolls this out and everybody else can close up shop and go home. What could beat true 3-D gaming.

In fact it could be here already. There was a persistent rumor that Nintendo had a big surprise already built into the system. Everyone has given up waiting but they already have the infrared lamp that could synch the glasses. If they have it ready to send a video synch. - not hard- it's done. It may be they ship motion Plus and the next day announce a firmware upgrade and some glasses at $49 a pair and hell, Wii sport resort could even be a 3-D game.

Maybe they will wait for the Wii2 but I don't know why. Given the choice between pretty shading and true 3-D virtual reality I know what I'd choose.

Grampy

Why did you do that

Now I'm going to have trouble going to sleep

@Grampy

The wired 3D google you described was in fact made into a game goggle by Sega for the Master System.  This was released in 1987 I believe.    I am sure the new 3D glasses you described are much better, but the technical principle is the same as that used by the Sega 3D-Glasses.   Human sees 3D because each eye sees a slightly different angle of the same image.  To simulate this 3D perception, some electronic 3D goggles has builtin shutter in the lenses.  The lenses then alternate quickly (shut and open) in sync with the screen display to fool the eyes into the seeing two images on the same screen.   

Below:  picture of the SegaScope 3D for the 8bit Master System.

There were around a dozen 3D games for the Master system.    Most played well and the 3D effect were convincing.  However, the refresh rates were not high enough for alternating images to display smoothly (You can't expect much for an 8bit system)  resulting in constant lens flickering.  After long sessions of play, this could be quite a workout for the eyes.

Another problem with any game devices that make people wear something is that they had not been successful.  The Nintendo Power Gloves, The Sega 3D glasses are just two examples.

I can see that Nintendo, as you point out, continue to innovate in the 3D controller space, but I don't see them try another 3D goggle any time soon.  Unless the technology has matured enough to provide a pleasant 3D experience with out eye strains (with or without glasses).

Related technology but different effect. The glasses I am desribing appear just as plain glasseswith a just perceptable neutral tint like some photogray lens indoors. You are looking through them at your television. You could read a book or watch a normal show. They are slightly heavier than regular glasses since they much have electrical power but they use reatively. if you activated the 3D feature in the game without wearing the glasses you would see a flickering shift in the image as though the TV has a poor signal perhaps because you would be seeing both the left and right camera symultaneously through both eyes and your brain couldn't seperate them.

When the glasses are activated you would immediately see 3-D without the distortion of color filters, polarizing filters or trick lenses. The switching of the glasses from dark to light is too rapid to be perceived and it is though the photogray glasses had darkened a bit. Otherwise the image quality, color and sharpness is exactly what it would normally be.

Seeing 3-D on your 40 inch plasama screen would be a very different experience than squinting at the glasses in the old system. The video rate is normal so there is no noticable flicker. The 3-D would not be actually simulated or created. In the sense that the two cameras in the game would be positioned with normal eye seperation the 3-D would be quite natural. As far as wearing something, it would be pretty much like wearing a pair of glasses. If that was uncomfortable or for people that can't use such a system, blind in one eye is a obvious example the effect could be switched off.

I suspect that it would have to be switchable for other reason. Where Resident Evil strikes me as a game with marvelous 3-D potential, I can imagine it scaring the poop out of you too.

I see, it looks as though the glasses you described had solved several problems of older 3D glasses. If we can just have the price come down to about $50 then surely the hardcore gamers, like myself, will jump on it.

I am still not sure if the mainstream market will embrace such device. But we will see. It has been what? 20 years since this Sega 3D Scope came out. May be it is about time people try this new stuff.