HIGH-END GAMING AND SIMULATION TIME TO GET SERIOUS!

Tim Sinnaeve, MD High-End Residential at Barco, says its time to get serious about high-performance gaming.

Should installers focus on next gen consoles or PC gaming?

Much has been written about how the COVID-19 Pandemic has changed gaming. According to one survey on inverse.com, 77.1% of respondents played more games than before, with almost no respondents playing less. Simulators, especially Sim Racing, gained much wider popularity, and Microsoft Flight Simulator’s first major new release in 14 years was called “the most incredible experience I’ve ever had on a computer” in an IGN review. Its realism is unprecedented.

According to Frank Azor, chief architect of gaming solutions at AMD, shipments of gaming PCs and monitors were up 26% in 2020. Demand for the new PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S consoles went through the roof and finding one became almost impossible. And if you are currently looking for a new graphics card for your high-end gaming PC, you will need good fortune in every sense of the word…

So it’s no surprise that gaming was on many lists of the top opportunities for 2021 for our industry. Now that we are seeing the light at the end of the Pandemic tunnel, have we taken that opportunity? Should we be worried that with the end of the pandemic we will see that opportunity evaporate?

Perhaps starting with gaming’s post pandemic future, at Barco Residential we tend to take a positive view. There is no doubt that the gaming population was already growing, with the pandemic acting as a major accelerator. This larger audience is not going to go away, and while other sources for entertainment will be available, they will not just lose their newfound appetite for gaming. Especially since the best in terms of gaming experience is yet to come, with gaming studios able to take advantage of new technologies in their gaming engines and better hardware available to gamers. One negative impact of the pandemic was that many major game titles saw their launch dates pushed back, with more delays expected to come. The upside of that however is that this new larger audience has a lot to look forward to in the next months. On our end of the market, it also isn’t simply a question of I already ordered new gaming gear on Amazon and now I’m done for a while. It takes some time and planning to create a highend, world-class gaming environment.

Whether as an industry we are fully taking this opportunity is a different question. While we have seen gaming related projects and interest grow, it doesn’t feel like this is anywhere near the level it could be, and that by and large, we are still not pro-actively offering it as a core experience to our clients. The key there is to inspire our clients with a world-class gaming environment, as well as put more focus on gaming from a sales and marketing perspective, where we need to create more opportunities for clients to experience what we can offer in terms of gaming. Perhaps a launch party for your clients for some of the upcoming big game releases like Battlefield 2042, Far Cry 6 or Microsoft Forza Horizon 5 in time to drive projects for the holidays?

CREATING A WORLD-CLASS GAMING ENVIRONMENT

A first question perhaps is console or PC? If you really want to push the envelope when creating a world-class gaming and simulation environment, PC gaming is the only choice in our opinion. It’s, where the limits of the experience are truly pushed in terms of resolution, frame rates, … A single high-end graphics adapter, the key component in a gaming PC, costs several times what the latest consoles cost and the innovation cycles on PC hardware are much faster than the renewal cycles on consoles, which are several years. That being said, gaming consoles are relatively cheap and can be more convenient than PC gaming, so you can and should have both available when demoing gaming to clients.

The next thing up is the digital canvas. What is more immersive than life-size to create a portal into the ultimate gaming environment? While we can use different technologies, projection offers a lot of flexibility and advantages for gaming and is also the preferred technology for professional simulators. We want to go as close to life-size as we possibly can. This means high brightness, 4K resolution, HDR capability at 60+ fps and even 120 fps so we have sharp and detailed images during fast motion for fast-paced games and simulations. Cinemascope and wider offer even more opportunity to elevate the experience.

Low input lag, the delay between the display receiving a signal and it being displayed on the screen, is critical in gaming and simulation. DLP projectors are particularly well suited as the DMD imaging device has a response time measured in microseconds vs the milliseconds for LCD and LCoS panels. Any image processing (such as upscaling or motion smoothing) adds further input lag, which is why we developed Single-Step-Processing (SSP) to further cut down processing time and input lag in our projectors.

Simulators put even higher demands, as frame rates and lag become even more critical. This is where our market leadership as the leading provider of DLP projectors in the commercial pilot training market comes into play. The most renowned front-line fighter and rotor-wing aircraft have Barco projectors in their simulators, as does the iconic BMW Motorsport Simulator. Our advances in 4K performance, color richness, high frame rates and the use of laser and LED technology set us apart in the industry and feed into our products for the highend residential markets.

Sound is of course critical as well when creating an immersive gaming environment, with several games supporting surround sound and even Dolby Atmos. Our industry’s experience and focus on high quality sound (not to mention sound-proofing) for home theatre applications should give us all the necessary expertise to carry that through to high-end gaming.

THE GAMING SPACE

As regards the space itself, there is a whole range there, from using an existing home theatre or media room to a going all out with a dedicated room optimised for a specific application such as simracing, taking inspiration from some of the professional simulation setups mentioned before.

An existing home theatre, particularly one with cinemascope capabilities, can already offer a great gaming experience. Some theater seating manufacturers are also adding gaming specific features, cleverly integrating gaming controls. And as regards design, some themed home theatre designs can already align quite well with certain games, think Star Wars for example. But this is also an interesting opportunity for theatre designers to expand into game room design.

But to really expose clients to a unique gaming experience, we would recommend creating a more dedicated life-size setup mapping an entire wall to create that impression that you’ve pushed over the wall into the gaming world. This doesn’t require a large space to create a large impact.

Let’s start planning those launch parties for our clients. There is of course more to creating the perfect gaming environment than we can cover in this article, but we would be happy to provide any advice to help you the high-end gaming opportunity!