The Busts and the Best of E3 2012

iPads on Xboxes? Books that make magic? Here are the biggest announcements from Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo at E3 2012.

E3 2012

Video gaming’s biggest convention of the year is going on right now, led by press conferences from Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo. E3 2012 has been games and hardware, not consoles: While 2011 brought Nintendo’s Wii U announcement, neither Sony nor Microsoft is revealing its next console just yet, and Nintendo doesn’t have much new to say.

But there is an advantage to the mature consoles of today: getting all sorts of new things to do with the hardware we already own (and it sure beats spending more money!). Microsoft will stream content to iOS and Android devices, while Sony is making books magical.

Here are the key announcements from the big three briefings.

The Win

Xbox SmartGlass: a second screen for the Microsoft Xbox 360

While video games consoles traditionally have been closed to products by third parties, Microsoft is opening up the Xbox 360 to iPads, iPhones, and Android devices through a free multiplatform portal app it calls SmartGlass.

"You launch your SmartGlass app, then it pairs you with your console," Xbox Live Corporate Vice President Marc Whitten tells PM. "It then stays in sync with the experiences you have on your console."

For example: During the presentation, Microsoft demonstrated watching a movie on a tablet and then continuing it on the 360. More impressively, it demoed playing Game of Thrones on the 360 through HBO Go while feeding a map of Westeros (the show’s primary setting) to the iPad; the map showed where each scene was taking place in time with the show.

SmartGlass, then, can provide simple Wi-Fi remote integration like we see on a lot of the newest TVs—or something far more robust. In Xbox 360 games, SmartGlass can serve as a creative secondary controller. A press demo showed calling plays on Madden NFL through a touchscreen.

Still, are there any imposed limitations on how developers integrate touchscreens with the Xbox? When we asked Whitten if, say, mundanely duplicating the stock 360 controller on a touchscreen would be allowed, he said, "If that’s best for the experience . . . sure." So it would seem there’s no single rubric Microsoft will impose on developers.

SmartGlass will also power the newly announced Internet Explorer on the Xbox 360. An iPad could serve as a giant trackpad, allowing you to use a cursor on the television in an interface reminiscent of Pinterest. We’ve seen the trackpad idea in iOS/Android apps before, but it’s brilliant to bring it into the living room. And text input will be entirely predictable because the keyboard will always be the stock keyboard from your mobile device.

Technically speaking, SmartGlass’s limitations seem few: It can stream content from both the cloud and the 360, meaning pulling dynamic information from the Web—such as real-time stats from basketball games—is entirely possible. The bigger question is, will developers take the extra time to build robust SmartGlass experiences into their games and media? With hundreds of millions of Android and iOS devices on the market, the answer to that question seems obvious.

The Weird

It’s a book filled with blank pages. But hold the paper up to a PS Eye (Sony’s digital camera device for PS3) and it transforms into an interactive pop-up book fueled by augmented reality.

The Wonderbook will be Sony’s swing-for-the-fences PS3 product of the year, a quirky product that highlights Sony’s ingenuity, strangeness, and love for proprietary products. Out this holiday season, the first Wonderbook will be Book of Spells by J.K. Rowling. It transforms the PS3’s Move controller into a wand on the screen, allowing gamers to learn spells as if they were new Hogwarts students.

In Sony’s demo, the animations were smooth and gorgeous. Words float from the pages, igniting with fire. Dragons pop off the page and fly around the room. It’s everything great Sony has done with its augmented reality games like Eye of Judgement, but designed for a mass youth audience.

Now we’ll just have to see whether the ergonomics of looking at a TV to see something held in your hand makes sense, whether other books will work as well for the format, and whether J.K. Rowling can convince us not only to buy Book of Spells, but also buy the PS Eye and a Move controller to "read" it, too.

The Bust

Nintendo’s Wii U



At E3, Nintendo made one big hardware announcement about its upcoming Wii U console: It will support two of the Gameboy-esque Wii U Gamepads, not just one, as was implied last year.

Yes, most reports imply that the base bundle available when the Wii U goes on sale (the price and release date are still unknown) will include only one. And it’s notable that Nintendo shared no dual Gamepad play scenarios during the press conference.

In addition to that tidbit, Nintendo snuck in a new controller announcement last weekend before E3. It’s called the Wii U Pro Controller, and it looks a lot like an Xbox 360 gamepad for precision control experiences where Nintendo’s motion systems don’t quite fit. This is good news for third-party game developers. It should be more feasible for them to move Sony PS3 or Xbox 360 games to the Wii U without enlisting a whole new development team to rewrite a game for Nintendo’s sometimes-too-imaginative control schemes.

If there’s one trend to take away from E3 2012, it’s the move from one screen to many. Along with the Xbox’s SmartGlass, there was Sony’s brief tease of Vita-to-PS3 multiplayer and PlayStation-certified Android devices (not new announcements, but reminders), and Nintendo’s solidarity on the Wii U Gamepad.

But for now, Microsoft is the only one of the three that’s opening the gates wide for second-screen integration. If Sony and Nintendo can talk about gaming without talking about iPhones and iPads, can they really talk about gaming at all?