The arrival of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) each year always provides a welcome boost for technology journalists as the dearth of stories over the Christmas break is traded for a veritable rash of futurism stories. Increasingly games technology is being featured or games are being used to demonstrate multi-purpose technologies. What is clear this year is that apart from the usual “names,” smaller companies are there with interesting peripherals. Take for example SoftKinetic’s time of flight sensors and cameras. Many of these already have development kits available for prototyping so those developers looking to submit an application to our next main funding round which will open in February have time to investigate prototyping novel control mechanisms before applying. Such applications have potential to score well on the level of innovation but must be accompanied with evidence of route to market. Now at first look that might seem to create insurmountable challenges. How (for example) can you predict the adoption of a peripheral by a platform holder? Well, there are other strategies you could consider. For example contacting the peripheral manufacturer to strike a deal to bundle the prototyped content with demos or looking beyond mainstream platform holders to niches in other sectors where customers would make a hardware / content purchase. Whatever the route, provided you ensure that the application doesn’t hang on innovation alone and pays close attention to our other criteria you can be sure that the lack of an installed base won’t deter us per se. Finally, you could also consider original uses of existing peripherals such as Kinect given the availability of official PC dev kits and the interesting uses these are being put to at CES.
PD
