Computer games - The Computing Universe: A Journey through a Revolution - page 182

followed this by launching its Xbox Live service in 2002. This service uses the
Internet (see Chapter 10 ) to support online gaming among multiple players. Halo
2 was released in November 2004 and soon became the most popular online game.
By June 2006, more than five hundred million games of Halo 2 had been played
with more than seven hundred million hours played on Xbox Live. However,
although Xbox sold more than twenty-four million units, comparable to the sales
of Nintendo's GameCube, both were well behind the sales of Sony's PS2.
Competition in the manufacture of video game consoles continues to be
fierce. Sony introduced the PlayStation 3 (PS3) in 2006, but its unconventional
hardware architecture with IBM's novel cell processor made it a difficult plat-
form for game developers. The PlayStation 4, launched in 2013, returned to a
more conventional microprocessor chip based on the Intel x86 architecture. The
Microsoft Xbox 360, introduced in 2005, competed directly with the PS3, and by
2013 both consoles had sold more than seventy million units. Nintendo launched
the innovative Wii in November 2006. The Wii incorporates a handheld point-
ing device that can detect motion in three dimensions. This enabled Nintendo
to broaden the appeal of their console beyond the core gaming community and
the Wii sold more than eighty million units, outselling the Xbox 360 and the
PS3. With the launch of Kinect in 2010, the Microsoft Xbox gaming console intro-
duced another mode of interaction by allowing gamers to control the Xbox using
spoken commands and gestures. After Kinect had sold eight million units in the
first sixty days after launch, Guinness World Records recognized it as the “fastest
selling consumer device.” 6 The competition between the Microsoft Xbox One and
the PS4, both launched in 2013, promises to be interesting to watch.

Fig. 9.7. Halo: Combat Evolved was the
launch title for the Microsoft Xbox in
2001. The initial game has spawned
many sequels as well as a prequel in
Halo: Reach. The writer Brian Bendis has
compared the cultural effect of Halo to
that of the Star Wars movies.

Computer graphics and video games

The term computer graphics was first used in 1960 by William Fetter, a graphic
designer at the Boeing Company. Much of the early research on computer graph-
ics was inspired by the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) air defense
project at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory. The SAGE system used a CRT monitor for
display and a light pen device developed at the Lincoln Lab for user interac-
tions with the screen. In 1959, Wesley Clark and others at the laboratory created
the TX-2 computer. Ivan Sutherland, then a graduate student at MIT, developed
Sketchpad, a revolutionary graphics software program that allowed users to
draw simple shapes on the TX-2 computer screen using a light pen. In 1967,
David Evans recruited Sutherland to the computer graphics research group at
the University of Utah. During the 1970s, many of the important breakthroughs
in computer graphics research originated from the Utah research group.
Computer displays are built up from two-dimensional grids of small
rectangular cells called pixels - “picture elements.” The picture is built up from
these cells, and the smaller and closer the pixels are together, the better the
quality - or the “higher the resolution” - of the image. Modern displays and
printers are raster devices , which produce an image by scanning it as a series
of lines. A raster scan is the pattern of parallel lines that construct an image
on a CRT screen. A raster graphics image or bitmap is just the rectangular grid
of pixels that make up the image. The bitmap corresponds bit-for-bit with the
image displayed on the screen and is characterized by the width and height of