Creating an Industry Standard For Game Input

What this means for the future of platforms is a richer, more engaging experience that cannot be found anywhere else, bringing Smart TV to the forefront of home entertainment. Using existing connected devices, just as smart phones and tablets, service operators can provide compelling interaction experiences without needing to ship expensive motion sensing remotes to clients with their set-top boxes. Moreover, these service operators and connected electronics manufacturers can benefit by positioning themselves as experienced differentiators in the market, offering this new and possibility-rich research.

Developers are already then aware of the tedious decision-making that comes with programming input APIs for multi-platform games. Enter today’s ecosystem of input devices: motion remotes, camera devices, wireless mice, microphones, and multi-screen/touch-screen input. The lesson here is that cross-platform development requires a standard. Why do developers choose to accept different APIs from different input manufacturers? Microsoft has its own set of APIs for input, Apple has a different set, and Android another. These days, developers are frequently deploying similar code bases across multiple platforms, and as the number of platforms increases, the time it takes to optimize input can become significant.

The Khronos Group is an industry consortium

The Khronos Group is an industry consortium, working to create open standards for parallel computing, graphics and dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. The group was founded in January 2000 by a number of leading research companies, including: TransGaming, 3Dlabs, ATI, discreet, Evans & Sutherland, Intel, Nvidia, SGI and Sun Microsystems. Since at the time, membership has expanded to include companies just as HP, EA, Google, Toshiba and many others. Many of these companies are at the forefront of development of new sensor technologies, just as depth cameras and motion-sensing devices.

As we shaped it, we decided that there is no point in building it to have and use on our own platforms exclusively when our passion is cross-platform enablement. We realized that the point of establishing and standardizing a universal input system is that it requires the contribution, ideas, opinions and offerings of experts of many different fields that deal with input systems every day. Our vision with StreamInput is to have a so then-defined standard, bringing all innovation, device manufacturers, software developers, etc. at the same time under one umbrella to say, "this is how input should be done on a singular level." Currently we work with companies just as Nokia, Electronic Arts, Nvidia, Razer, Broadcom, Sony Computer Entertainment, Intel, SoftKinetic and Qualcomm.

Thanks to cloud gaming and this new breed of "input-agnostic" games innovation, we can now consider in the nearly future:

The same time

Put all those at the same time, and it’s easy to see that one of the biggest business opportunities in gaming lies in creating consistency in the living room. Input agnostic software will usher in a distinct new genre of video games and accessories, designed for use with any system. We are defining a new standard; one in other words suitable for games, flight simulators, computing methods of daily life, etc. This will allow platforms to provide a richer, more engaging experience that cannot be found anywhere else.