Game Developer's Conference 2015 is upon us and for once a year the leading technical, designing and programming minds from software and hardware companies, as well as your favourite gaming developers, gather in San Francisco to discuss and debate on what makes the gaming scene tick as well as the future and current trajectory of our industry.
This year's buzzword seems to be "Virtual Reality" and we can see why; between the
Oculus Rift (which is at the
Development Kit 2 stage), the
Razer Hydra controller,
Sony's Project Morpheus and with the
recent announcement from
Valve that they are partnering with
HTC to produce the
Vive VR Headset, the virtual reality and gaming scene looks to be one that will be hotly contested by hardware developers, graphic engine companies and gaming studios for many fiscal annum cycles to come.
Just in case you got confused; clockwise from top-right -
Oculus Rift DKII, Sony's Project Morpheus, Valve and HTC's Vive and the Razer Hydra.
From the graphics side we can be sure to see more of
Microsoft's DirectX 12, featured in the
Windows 10 technical preview,
AMD's Mantle API that was present alongside
Battlefield 4's launch and finally the
glNext API, which is the follow-up to the open-source
OpenGL, often used in
Linux and
Mac-based systems. In fact, for
glNext they have a panel that is sponsored by
Valve and which would see staff from
Khronos,
Valve,
EA,
Epic and
Unity be present for its debut.
Finally
GDC wouldn't be
GDC without its famous talks and presentations and again through the presentation titles we can see how this year's convention is firmly steered towards Virtual Reality as the future of gaming.
John Carmack who was co-founder of
Id Software and now
Chief Technological Officer at
Oculus VR has a speech named "The Dawn of Mobile VR".
The two Graphic engine giants go head to head in a new field.
Sony has two presentations, or rather sharing sessions, in which they will detail their experience working on VR software and last but not least
nVidia and
AMD both go head-to-head to impress clients and gamers on their development of VR-related graphics with presentations titled "VR Direct: How NVIDIA Technology is Improving the VR Experience" and "Low Latency and Stutter-Free Rendering in VR and Graphics Applications" respectively.
Not counting any surprise and unscheduled announcements,
GDC 2015 should give us a good idea of the path that the gaming industry is heading forth to, namely the development of Virtual Reality hardware to a level where it is a consumer-accessible model and of this we are sure to keep a keen eye on.
What do you expect to come out of this year's
GDC? Do give us your thoughts and feedback below!
