By now, Nintendo has made exactly 87,493,029 versions of Mario Kart since the game was first introduced in 1992 for the Super Nintendo. (Okay, the company has really made 13—which is still a lot!) But a new sequel coming this fall to the Nintendo Switch changes the formula in an enticing way, thanks to super experimental UX.
Developers both large and small can benefit from an outside perspective given by a game user research, or usability research geared towards games. Indie developers can benefit from adding UX expertise to the development team, while large developers can obtain an outside perspective to compliment and verify findings from internal members of the development team. In this article, we will present three key ways in which game research can maximize a game’s success.
We are moving into a future where games train our doctors, monitor our health, and treat our illnesses.
San Francisco – The next big leap for virtual and augmented reality headsets is likely to be eye-tracking, where headset-mounted laser beams aimed at eyeballs turn your peepers into a mouse.
Crytek’s new project for the Oculus Rift shows us exactly where VR gaming is going – towards heady and experiential gameplay
Above you, the craggy face of the cliff seems to stretch up endlessly toward the sky, offering perilously few footholds. In the far distance there’s a small village by a beach, bathed in orange sunshine – an exotic idyll. But below you there is … nothing. Nothing but a long deadly drop into the crashing sea far below. Your only option is to keep climbing.
A View-Master for virtual reality: Hands-on with Mattel’s new AR, VR phone toy
Mattel is relaunching View-Master, but as a virtual reality and augmented-reality phone toy. And I got to play around with it for a bit…or at least, some of the tech behind it.
Up close with the HoloLens, Microsoft’s most intriguing product in years
We just finished a heavily scripted, carefully managed, and completely amazing demonstration of Microsoft’s HoloLens technology. Four demos, actually, each designed to show off a different use case for a headset that projects holograms into real space. We played Minecraft on a coffee table. We had somebody chart out how to fix a light switch right on top of the very thing we were fixing.
Forget voice commands and touch gestures: A London firm has developed a way for Google Glass users to control their devices just by thinking.
This Place, an agency that specializes in creating user interfaces and experiences for programs used in the medical industry, developed a software called MindRDR that allows Google Glass to connect with the Neurosky MindWave Mobile EEG biosensor, a head-mounted device that can detect a person’s brain waves.
$350 device tracks your arms and hands with military-designed sensors
New technologies such as Google Glass and Oculus’ Rift headset are making it easier than ever for us to get our heads into augmented and virtual realities. But while we get our heads into these alternate worlds and use our eyes to check our emails, surf the internet, even destroy enemy starfighters with a spiral of missiles, our hands are left behind in the real world.
A new study has revealed that gamers are more likely to experience feelings of aggression from playing a game when it is too difficult or when the controls are too complicated to master.
In comparison, the research found there was “little difference” in levels of aggression when the games themselves depicted violence. Overwhelmingly, the deciding factor was “how the volunteers were able to master the electronic game after 20 minutes of play”.