La Steambox ufficiale sarà anche un server che potrà essere collegata a più TV.Newell also tipped Valve's hand on target pricing for Steam Boxes built by partners, saying that the company sees three tiers of hardware specifications: "Good, Better," and "Best." He says the goal for a "Good" platform is a free device, but that one would probably start around $99 and eventually come down. Newell says a midrange device should cost around $300, and that the top-tier is only limited by how much someone is willing to spend.
Update 2: Nuovo interview a Gabe Newell di The Verge che rivela molte info sulle Steambox, che anche la Valve stessa ne farà una e che sono interessati in controlli biometrici, ma non di movimento."The Steam Box will also be a server," Newell says, "so you could have one PC and eight televisions and eight controllers."
Update 1: Non ce ne sarà una Steambox sola, come molti si aspettavano, ma diversi modelli da diversi manufattori con specs diverse che sono basate su Steam e la Big Picture mode.The Verge: So you're working on your own Steam Box hardware. Why work with so many partners when you have your own ideal design in mind?
Gabe Newell: What we see is you've got this sort of struggle going on between closed proprietary systems and open systems. We think that there are pluses and minuses to open systems that could make things a little messier, it’s much more like herding cats, so we try to take the pieces where we’re going to add the best value and then encourage other people to do it. So it tends to mean that a lot of people get involved. We’re not imposing a lot of restrictions on people on how they’re getting involved.
TV: We've heard lots of rumors about the Steam Box, including that Valve's own hardware would be "tightly controlled." Can you tell us more about Valve's own hardware effort?
Gabe: The way we sort of think of it is sort of "Good, Better," or "Best." So, Good are like these very low-cost streaming solutions that you’re going to see that are using Miracast or Grid. I think we’re talking about in-home solutions where you’ve got low latency. "Better" is to have a dedicated CPU and GPU and that’s the one that’s going to be controlled. Not because our goal is to control it; it’s been surprisingly difficult when we say to people "don’t put an optical media drive in there" and they put an optical media drive in there and you’re like "that makes it hotter, that makes it more expensive, and it makes the box bigger." Go ahead. You can always sell the Best box, and those are just whatever those guys want to manufacture. [Valve's position is]: let's build a thing that’s quiet and focuses on high performance and quiet and appropriate form factors.
TV: So are most of these going to be Linux-based Steam Boxes?
Gabe: We’ll come out with our own and we’ll sell it to consumers by ourselves. That’ll be a Linux box, [and] if you want to install Windows you can. We’re not going to make it hard. This is not some locked box by any stretch of the imagination. We also think that a controller that has higher precision and lower latency is another interesting thing to have.
TV: Speaking of controllers, what kind of creative inputs are you working on? Valve has already confessed its dissatisfaction with existing controllers and the kinds of inputs available. Kinect? Motion?
Gabe: We’ve struggled for a long time to try to think of ways to use motion input and we really haven’t [found any]. Wii Sports is still kind of the pinnacle of that. We look at that, and for us at least, as a games developer, we can’t see how it makes games fundamentally better. On the controller side, the stuff we’re thinking of is kind of super boring stuff all around latency and precision. There’s no magic there, everybody understands when you say "I want something that’s more precise and is less laggy." We think that, unlike motion input where we kind of struggled to come up with ideas, [there's potential in] biometrics. We have lots of ideas.
I think you’ll see controllers coming from us that use a lot of biometric data. Maybe the motion stuff is just failure of imagination on our part, but we’re a lot more excited about biometrics as an input method. Motion just seems to be a way of [thinking] of your body as a set of communication channels. Your hands, and your wrist muscles, and your fingers are actually your highest bandwidth — so to trying to talk to a game with your arms is essentially saying "oh we’re going to stop using ethernet and go back to 300 baud dial-up." Maybe there are other ways to think of that. There’s more engagement when you’re using larger skeletal muscles, but whenever we go down [that path] we sort of come away unconvinced. Biometrics on the other hand is essentially adding more communication bandwidth between the game and the person playing it, especially in ways the player isn’t necessarily conscious of. Biometrics gives us more visibility. Also, gaze tracking. We think gaze tracking is going to turn out to be super important.
[...]
Modelli:A Valve official tells Polygon that they plan to spend their week at the Consumer Electronics Show meeting with hardware and content developers in their booth and showcasing "multiple" custom hardware prototypes.
On Monday, Valve grabbed the CES spotlight when hardware partner Xi3 announced plans for their "steam box" Piston computer game system. The still-in-development Steam-optimized mini PC, backed by an "investment from Valve Corporation", will offer up to 1 TB of internal storage and modular component updates.
Reached for comment this morning about the forthcoming piece of hardware, Valve marketing director Doug Lombardi told Polygon that Piston is just one of many hardware prototypes they brought to the show.
"Valve will be at CES to meet with hardware and content developers in our booth space," Lombardi said. "We are bringing multiple custom (hardware) prototypes as well as some off-the-shelf PCs to our CES meetings."
Lombardi described the prototypes as "low-cost, high-performance designs for the living room that are great candidates for Steam and Big Picture.
"We will be sharing more information to the press and public in the coming months," he added.
Xi3 Piston:
- SPOILER | Mostra
Ultima modifica di Fosh il 9 gennaio 2013, 17:01, modificato 7 volte in totale.
