1. Describe your featured media and how it will enhance the user’s life and experience; 

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed is the first of any Lucas Arts game to have ever used the programs Digital Molecular Matter (DMM) and Euphoria; two technologies unique to Lucas Arts. Their main purpose is to make everything in the game more realistic, and from this make you feel as though you’re part of the game from its life like capabilities.

Digital molecular matter allows us to simulate the way the materials behave in the real world based upon real world properties. Wood will break like wool would, glass will break like glass, metal will even dent like metal. For example, a piece of plywood in a game using the traditional methods for breakables would mean creating a piece of plywood that isn’t broken, and one that is. After an object hits it, the broken piece plywood would immediately swap with the whole piece, making each time it breaks the same, not taking into account the direction or the force of impact. Applying DMM, however, you would see it breaks differently every single time. It actually takes into account forces in the real physical world and it behaves as you would expect plywood to behave. Every time you reset it you can see it will break differently, just by the level of realism and fidelity that is absent in most games.

Euphoria is a system that allows us to give our characters biomechanical AI (computer generated artificial intelligence). It literally infuses them with a central nervous system, a brain, a spinal chord, a nervous system and even muscles that allow them to act by reflex. The characters will try to protect themselves; they’ll know what is happening to them and react appropriately. For example, if a character was being thrown into mid air, they would realize it and know that they’re about to fall to their deaths unless they can grab onto something. So, they will actually try to hold on to try and preserve themselves.

These two technologies bind together in the sense that not only do we have characters interacting with the environment in a very realistic way, but the environment also knows about those characters. As the characters search for something to grab on to, that something will actually splinter under their weights or bend; the stress will actually show and it will eventually break.

LA games are not just about having entertaining and high fidelity interaction with the environment and characters but also having those other characters interact in a meaningful and high fidelity ways.

2. Outline the elements this invention retrieves from past technologies; 

Video games all run off of the same ideas; to give you a simulated experience where you can be entertained embodying a character that is unlike yourself. However, DMM and Euphoria take the past usual technologies of programmed environments and characters and give them their own minds, allowing your experience to be just that much closer to real life. The basic idea of the video game is the same, but these two technologies enhance the quality of the game play, therefore enhancing the user’s experience. 

3. State what this new media will obsolesce;

            DMM and Euphoria bring life and realism to the video games which use these technologies. Using these will obsolesce the obvious animation and simulation seen in video games. They give variety and spontaneity to the game, as life would, allowing no one experience in the game to be the same. People could no longer get tired of playing the same level on a game because every outcome, ever course, every action had to be performed the same way to succeed. Using the artificial intelligences in Euphoria will allow other characters to interact with you differently each time and react to your actions appropriately, and the environment using DMM will respond to your actions exactly how they would in real life depending on how you and others interact with it. With these two technologies, no one course of the game will ever be the same. 

4. Define what factors this invention will reverse when pushed to its outer limit.

            The spontaneity created using DMM and Euphoria is meant to keep the game interesting and creative for the player. However, the level of DMM and Euphoria used in Star Wars: The Force Unleashed is as innovative as engineers know how to produce right now, but the level of intensity these technologies bring to the game can be easily soon increased. As you play games you learn certain patterns and techniques of what works and what doesn’t in the game, and if there is any more spontaneity, the whole idea and fun of learning the game may be over taken. If nothing is ever the same in the game to the point that you will not be able to make a shot you were able to make the last time you played, having to re-teach yourself new strategies could annoy the player, defeating the purpose of fun in the video game.