Showstoppers at E3 Displays New Tech

 June 5, 2012, ShowStoppers, Los Angeles—We stopped by ShowStoppers at the E3 show to check out some of the latest technologies. Sharing seems to be the big new thing associated with games.

For shared viewing, capture, and streaming the games, AVerMedia and Elgato make plug-in subsystems for PCs or Macs that watch the gaming efforts and transfer the video to computer storage or another screen. The Elgato box is for X-Box and PlayStation and sits between the console and the display. AVerMedia makes a range of PC plug-in boards and external boxes that sit in the video stream as a pass through.

Aura Logo

Aurasma-Autonomy makes an image and text recognition app that can provide augmented reality enhancements to those images. Anything marked with the new Aura logo can use the app to find other information from the text or image. The app can cache images for times when there is no Internet access. Users can create their own Auras and share them through social media.

Less about sharing and more about gaming were Boldai and Maximum Games. Boldai had a game development tool called “Blocksworld” that is a digital toy app for phones and tablets. This code-free game creation app allows users to easily create and share their own interactive, real-time 3D games, toys, and movies and more. Maximum Games released “Let’s Dance” a dance game, “Jett Tailfin” an underwater racing game, and “Legends of War: Patton’s Campaign” strategy game based on General Patton in WW II.

Escort now has an app that allows sharing of radar detection information even to people without a radar detector. ESCORT Live provides real-time cloud sharing of networked information from other users with radar detectors.

The MOCA Alliance (Multimedia over Coax Alliance) is the technology standard for media over coax. CAT5 costs much more than coax and WiFi can get overloaded when multiple users are all using its bandwidth. MoCA technology-based adapters provide reliable connection for gaming, music and streaming HD video. The technology can complement the Ethernet connections for video distribution within a house and connects to the existing coax connectors on TVs and set-top boxes. This technology can become the basis for the in-home media backbone.
Samsung Electronics exhibit wasn’t about sharing, but did show their latest SSDs. The drives have options for self-encryption and another version is rated for enterprise-class operations. To complement the SSDs, they showed a gaming-enhanced laptop, from the Series 7 family. If a full computer is too much to carry, consider the Galaxy player, a smart phone-sized tablet designed for gaming and multimedia. It has WiFi, Bluetooth, FM radio, and a pair of cameras. The player runs Android and has built-in stereo speakers. All the popular codecs are included as well as full versions of FIFA 2012 and Need for Speed.