Okay this is a pretty long read but I cut it up to make it a little shorter in this thread, if you want to read the whole thing go HERE.
Let's start this off with next generation.
2013: Badass Handhelds With Even Badderass Web Connections
A PS3 in Your Pocket
We'll be at the generation of the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox ... 720 or whatever they decide to call it.
Now, the gaming industry' greatest obstacle has always been the fact that humans eventually have to go outside. This is why handheld gaming is such a big deal these days The best-selling game machine isn't the Wii, PS3 or 360. It' the handheld Nintendo DS, by a huge margin.
Now, saying handheld gaming is the future right after saying online gaming is the future may sound like a contradiction. After all, wireless Internet access is spotty and cell phone Internet makes you feel like it' 1997 all over again. But ...
The Miracle of 4G
This is where 4G comes in.
4G is the upcoming standard that will give you a wireless connection at 100Mbit/s, anywhere. That' more than 30 times faster than the best DSL connection you can get at home, kids.
2018: Graphics Fired Directly into Your Eyeball, The End of the Game Console
Size Becomes a Non-Factor
Computers tend to double in speed (or shrink to half their size) every two years. If that continues, by 2018, we'll be getting close to the end of how small the circuits can get (or at least that's what they say) because at some point you're using circuits that are only one-molecule wide. Efforts to make them smaller than that will probably, like, make you travel back in time or some shit.
From HERE
By that point though, a system quite a bit more powerful than your PS3 would fit on a device small enough that a dog could swallow it. So, we're talking about gaming over a cell phone-sized device that' just short of movie quality.
Of course, the problem with making handhelds smaller and smaller is that you're making that screen smaller and smaller, too. What good are spectacular graphics on a tiny little screen you have to squint to see?
The answer is, of course ...
Your Eyeball Becomes the Monitor
VRD (Virtual Retina Display) is a system they're working on at the University of Washington that will project images right into your damned eyeball.
2023: No-Hands Gaming, Games That Learn
Brain Control
The problem with the head-mounted handhelds is, of course, you still need some kind of controller to move around and shoot the bad guys.
That' where direct brain control will come into play. This is where it all starts to sound like science fiction, but tell that to these people who are already developing a brain-computer interface they think will help with rehab for the disabled. Hitachi is testing one for everybody else:
You may insist that it's silly to think such world-changing technology would ever be used for something as frivolous as playing video games. But, then you have to tell the people at Emotiv, who have already made a device that can do it.
As for the games we'll be playing ...
Beyond AI
Assuming computer-processing power keeps expanding at the rate it's expected to, by this point a $1,000 computer will exceed the computational ability of the human brain.
You should have games that can pretty easily render simpler environments, such as a living room realistic enough that if you dozed off with your PlayStation 6 eyepiece in, you'd wake up and not realize you were still in-game. At least not until the demons showed up.
That actually sounds pretty cool now that we mention it. Imagine a haunted-house game with dead people and shit sneaking up on you all the time, and as far as your eyes and ears know, they're really there. We're talking about a game that could trigger a fear response that would physically make you poop your pants.
2028: Supercomputers Woven Into Your Jockstrap, Games That Do Everything
Computers Everywhere
If they keep bringing out new game machines every five years the way they have been, we'd be on the PlayStation 7 at this point. Though, that's really unlikely, even if Sony is still in business, and mankind has not been wiped out by the giant robots or the zombies.
The processing power and/or miniaturization of this stuff starts to get mind-boggling at this stage. If the "half-the-size-every-two-years" rule somehow held true to this point, you'd be talking about computing power in a package one-thousandth the size of what you're using now. That's laptops embedded in sheets of paper ...
... and processors woven into your clothes ...
"¦ with the costs low enough that if you left your computerized T-shirt at the park you'd hardly bother to go back and get it the next day. We hereby predict that by the year 2028, someone, somewhere, will literally wipe his ass with a computer more powerful than any that exists today.
2033: The Real-Life Matrix, Video Games That Are Way Smarter Than You
According to computer smart guy Raymond Kurzweil, by 2029 the kind of computer power it'll take to equal a human brain will cost about $1. If trends continue as they have been, what we're calling supercomputers could be made as small as a speck of dust. You could paint them on your walls.
Take the whole idea of distributed computing we talked about and multiply it several thousand times over. Computers become both ubiquitous and invisible, embedded in almost every surface you touch, with the whole atmosphere full of the data they're shooting back and forth to each other. More information than your parents absorbed in a lifetime could come firing into your brain in the blink of an eye.
Combine that with patents Sony already has for ways to fire ultrasound pulses into the brain to create real-life sensory experiences, and you've got everything you need for five-senses virtual reality. And, you don't even need the jacks in the back of your skull.
Imagine it. In your lifetime, a magical world where you can actually meet that Burger King mascot, and smell him and feel his robes. As for the porn, well, is it even porn at that stage? It's pretty much just sex. You have sex with the porn lady and when you roll over, there's the Burger King guy to hand you a Whopper in person.
You may be having so much fun in the game realm that you'll never want to leave. And that's OK, because this guy says that just down the road (around 2050) you'll be able to download your mind into the computer. Your body dies, you live on in the virtual world. Forever.
