So what happened to Sony’s 27″ OLED television?
In May 2008, chairman and chief executive Sir Howard Stringer said that, within the next twelve months, Sony would launch a 27″ television based on OLED – organic light emitting diode – technology.
More than twelve months later, with no 27″ version released and Sony showing only 21″ prototypes, it’s time to ask what happened.
So which factories will Sony close?
The restructuring that Sony announced on Tuesday – 8,000 job losses plus another 8,000 temporary workers, with five or six factory closures – has been criticised as light on specifics. The goal is to save Y100bn in the 2010 financial year, but there is no estimate of the cost, and little detail on which factories will close.Until Sony makes its intentions clear, all of its factory employees will feel under threat, but a few more details have now emerged.
Capcom goes to the movies
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lHhBQJ4gYE[/youtube]
One Namco Bandai engineer I spoke to had a decided view on this year’s Tokyo Game Show: “Capcom were the winners.”
With Monster Hunter 3, Street Fighter 4 and Resident Evil 5 all likely to meet critical and commercial success, that is hard to dispute. It also reflects both the risks that one of Japan’s largest game companies has taken to develop new franchises, and its determination to make games for the world rather than concentrate on a specific region or console.
Another part of Capcom’s strategy is to spin off films and other media based on its games. TGS saw the premiere of one such film, the animated zombie feature Resident Evil: Degeneration, which features classic bad movie dialogue such as this:
COMMANDER: “Is it too much to hope you at least have some sort of a plan!?”
LEON: “Shoot them in the head.”
It therefore seems unlikely that Degeneration will break the run of dire videogame-to-movie conversions. But rather than simply cashing in, Capcom has strategic reasons to make films that are linked to the wider problems of the Japanese game market.
Capcom’s president, Haru Tsujimoto, explains it like this: “In Japan the volume zone [for videogames] is middle and high school students, but in Europe and the US the volume zone is higher, people in their 20s. Japanese companies have to develop for their teenage market, whereas the twenty-somethings in Europe and the US have money in their pockets.
“We must attract Japanese players in their 20s as well, but people who first played Biohazard [the Japanese name for Resident Evil] at high school 12 years ago are now grown up and maybe think that games are for children. We hope that people will look at the Biohazard film and realise that technology has advanced and that the game they used to play is now very much like a film.”
Capcom’s strategy is to partner with Hollywood studios rather than take the creative and financial risk of making films itself, and it is systematically reviewing its game portfolio for movie-making opportunities.
Most Japanese videogame companies preach the gospel of convergence – that the gaps between different kinds of media will gradually disappear – but Capcom is being unusally proactive. Now all it needs to do is make the world’s first good movie to ever come out of a videogame…
A great little game at a great big show
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uToBarLr_U[/youtube]
If this was the Tokyo Game Show without the general public then there are going to be crush injuries on Saturday.
The first two days of the world’s premier video game show are now business days (although playing videogames with the PVC-clad girls that staff TGS is a funny kind of business) so you only have to queue for 45 minutes, rather than several hours, for a go at the most popular titles. I gave up quickly because, while I like to think I’m all right at games, I was getting murdered (and laughed at) by all of the game journalists and developers.
There were some impressive titles on show, though. Mirror’s Edge from Dice, Yakuza 3 from Sega, and Street Fighter 4 from Capcom were all drawing crowds, although it’s lots of violence that is unlikely to bring a new kind of gamer to Sony’s PlayStation 3 or Microsoft’s Xbox 360. Nintendo scorns TGS for its own private event.
With the PlayStation 3 stuck at $399 in the US, versus $199 for an Xbox 360 without a hard disk, Sony has the console most in need of compelling content. The two things that looked like they might do the job are Home - the PlayStation’s long-delayed (and still delayed) online community – and LittleBigPlanet.
Sony kept the punters on Home strictly regulated, and it’s easy to make a networked service work under controlled conditions, but it looked pretty and the idea of your own apartment in a 3D world is easy to get across.
LittleBigPlanet, meanwhile, is a joy. It’s basically an old-fashioned platform game, but with beautiful design, co-operative play across a network, and tools for users to very easily design their own levels (SCE’s US chief executive Jack Tretton had a level made for his financial presentation at E3 in the YouTube clip above).
Kazuo Hirai, the president of Sony Computer Entertainment, told me that it’s a title for which he has very high hopes, and if anything can move the PS3 this Christmas, LittleBigPlanet is it.
Mobile phones that fall apart
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amVqnCw55n4[/youtube]
This week’s CEATEC show in Tokyo showed that, while the Japanese mobile handset market may be in a slump, it is still the world’s most innovative.
Drawing the biggest crowds was the ‘Separate Keitai’ prototype developed by Fujitsu for the DoCoMo network. The phone detachs into parts – which talk to each other via Bluetooth – so, for example, you can update your schedule with one part while talking on the other.
There was even a concept model with a screen that wrapped around your wrist – very Star Trek – but the punters weren’t allowed to touch them. The Separates were also being swapped over with alarming frequency to recharge the batteries.
The AU network (always a bit more down to earth) had lots of incremental technologies, such as a motion sensor that can work out whether you are walking, driving or on a train and a system to broadcast Japan’s Wansegu TV signals in a local area.
To see functions that are certain to appear on mobiles soon, however, you had to walk to the components zone at the other end of CEATEC. One technology displayed at Mitsumi was battery management chips that can tell you exactly how much juice is left: that means an end to the three vague bars in the top left of the screen.
But most exciting were touch screen displays that offer force-feedback (they use the converse piezoelectric electric effect if you’re interested). On show at Hokuriku and SMK, if you press one you get a really satisfying vibration: perfect for a future iPhone, while if Nintendo aren’t considering it for the ultimate replacement to their DS console, they aren’t the technologists that I know them to be.
The joys of magnetic tape
Obsolete technologies such as film never die, they just go back to the lab to reincarnate in a new application.
Films and tapes are rapidly going the way of the dodo: audio tape was wiped out by compact disc, DVD has all but finished the video cassette, and digital cameras are hunting down the last few surviving models that use film. But the businesses that perfected magnetic tape and photographic film are still around – although sometimes in reduced circumstances – and they are busy thinking of new ways to use the stuff.
Most liquid crystal televisions, for example, include at least one of Fujifilm’s polarising films and at this week’s massive CEATEC consumer electronics show in Japan, TDK was showing prototypes of what you can do with tape.
One example was a sheet of transparent plastic, coated with conductive ITO film, that was picking up a pretty good TV signal even in the concrete cave of the Makuhari Messe. Make that work and the applications are obvious: your car windscreen could be one giant aerial, or the screen of your TV could act as its aerial as well.
Another example was a sheet coated with a film that conducts heat. Again, if it can be made commercially, you could use it to stop heat escaping through windows or, potentially, to act as a heat sink.
You’re still going to have to get rid of all those old video cassettes, but the tape inside them has life in it yet, and so do the companies that make it.
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