From chasing dots to reading minds: the past, present, and future of video game interaction

It is the calm before the storm. By the end of 2006, Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo will have released their new wave of gaming hardware, and the next round in the great video game battle will have begun. Capable of displaying photo-realistic images, and acting as the center of your entertainment lifestyle, these machines promise to change the face of gaming. Console games have moved away from the single-screen experiences of old, to multimillion dollar epics, featuring hours and hours of cinematic action. Truly, it is an exciting time to be a gamer. While visual and audio technology advances toward real-world fidelity, human computer interaction (HCI) — the methods by which users control the simulation — has not received the same degree of attention. But it now seems this aspect of the sense-of-presence problem may undergo a revolution similar to that of its audiovisual counterparts with the next generation of gaming devices. In this article, we discuss the driving forces behind these changes, several devices, and what current research suggests the future may hold for today's gamer.