Gaming Signal: Alternate Gaming Displays

Alternate Gaming Displays

In what I find interesting trend, extra displays are showing up on all sorts of products marketed at gamers. Is this just a blip, or the future? Does this help or hurt your gaming? What other displays make sense? I explore all that and more below.

It begins...
Logitech introduced a gaming keyboard last year. I believe they did this in order to compete with Saitek's success with its back-lit gaming keyboard. But what makes this special is that Logitech didn't just copy it, they also innovated. They didn't just include back-lit keys, but they also included a nifty multiline back-lit LCD display:

As you can see - they already see usage in FPS games to keep track of ammo. They also suggest (and ship) the ability to display CPU and memory utilization there (although this probably has dubious value while gaming.) There is a screenshot that also shows in-game chat (from what it appears to be an FPS, but could be an MMORPG) appearing there too. I could see other items shown on this little display - RPG character health, inventory, loot descriptions, etc. And as you might expect, people on the internet have embraced this and are already doing things ilke this - there is a thriving community of people adding G15 support to games (and how do I get these people to do free software development for me?)

There are even mods from gamers that display your unread mail and RSS feeds on it.

This display is a great idea, in my opinion. Anything that moves important, yet immersion-breaking information off of the main screen helps keep your head in the game, and housekeeping data off the display. And although this is largely 2D data that isn't hard for the graphic card to display, why not keep one more thing out of the display path and use those cycles for something else?

But not having one myself yet, will taking your eye off the screen to view it cause you to miss some action (important in an FPS)? Not sure, but I suspect your brain can process it all and it won't be a problem. Anybody else see a downside to this?

MFD-stick
But that's not all! There's also a new joystick/throttle combo from Saitek that includes an LCD display on the throttle. The X52 Flight Control System is a full functional joystick and throttle combination with all the features you would expect - 2-stage trigger, 8-way hats, rudder twist, etc. But what's unique about it is the LCD display - allowing you to keep track of the amount of bullets in your gun or missles under the wing (or on your shoulder pod, etc.):

I'm not personally in the market for a joystick/throttle combo anymore (sadly there hasn't been much worth playing here lately.) But if I was, this would definately be on my list.

Again, what do you think about this setup? Is it distracting? Does it decrease or increase your immersion - I could see it acting more like a real fighter (or mech) in that you do have multiple displays in the cockpit there too.

And are there more? Are you aware of other gaming devices with extra displays? If so - post 'em below!

Some more news (from November 2005 but no matter) on the whole 'gaming keyboard with a display' idea. The folks at Razer (the high precision mouse folks) have announced plans to produce a gaming keyboard with a color OLED display.

An some point aren't you going to be better off just getting a second monitor?

Actually that opens up all kinds of idea - imagine games offering the option of supportin multi-monitor with things like chat text or maps or other (mostly 2D) things residing on the other monitor? Of course, you'd have to compare that to the need to just have a great big gaming surface stretched across two monitors (2560x2048 gaming anyone?)

Posted by Scott on Saturday January 21, 2006 at 2:28 PM