Jen-Hsun Huang has thought about making Project Shield, the portable Android gaming system that Nvidia unveiled this week at the Consumer Electronics Show, for the past seven years. But the chief executive of the world’s biggest graphics chip maker had to pull a lot of things together first before deciding to make it — like figuring out how to make a gaming console.

Nvidia designs chips such as the Tegra 4 inside the Project Shield, but it’s never gone directly into the consumer market with its own game system. (It did go out on its own into the retail market before with its 3DVision 3D glasses in the past). Nvidia has also worked to establish a cloud gaming network dubbed the Nvidia GeForce Gaming Grid, which provides the underlying foundation for delivering games to the Shield device, which includes a 5-inch screen atop a game controller. Then it designed a new kind of processing for its latest graphics chips. And in the past year, it put the finishing touches on its Tegra 4 mobile processor, which has four computing cores and 72 graphics cores.

It would be wrong to think that Shield is just another Android game controller. It has a whole ecosystem built around it and high-end components for hardcore gamers. In short, Project Shield is a massive effort that required the work of thousands of Nvidia employees. Now, it’s finally ready, and Huang showed Project Shield to us in an interview at the Nvidia booth at CES. (See our hands-on vide0). Here’s an edited transcript of our exclusive interview.

GamesBeat: How heavy is it? A pound or so?

Jen-Hsun Huang: Here you go. It’s under a pound. A bit under a pound.

GamesBeat: It feels like a regular Xbox controller. 

Huang: Exactly. That’s ideal. We haven’t tuned any of the knobs on this, or the buttons, but ideally it should respond just like one. The moment you pick it up, you should recognize it as a controller.

There are two things that we wanted to do. We wanted to make sure that for anybody who picks it up, and in the moment that they do, they’re instantly familiar with it. All the controls are exactly where they expected. Secondly, because it’s pure Android, you know exactly how to use it. Because this is pure Android. If you’re an Android user — and this is targeting Android users — the moment that you turn it on, your whole life shows up. All your music is there. All your movies are there. All the Tegra Zone games you’ve already bought on your phone are there.

GamesBeat: What are some of the reactions you’ve heard so far? 

Huang: I would say that the No. 1 reaction is, “Wow, it’s a lot smaller than I expected.”

GamesBeat: What design decisions can you talk about? You could probably have just had a tablet sitting on top of something that you could attach, taking the controller away. I think I’ve seen other designs like that out there already. Is there a reason not to do that?

Huang: First of all, a tablet is too heavy. It’s too top-heavy. Second, notice that this isn’t a tablet. It’s just a display. All of the electronics, the batteries, are in here. The balance of the system wants to be in your hand. Even a phone is too top-heavy. Worse, you don’t want to drain the battery life of your phone. Your phone is used for communication. The benefit of using Android is that all of the content on your tablet or your phone automatically shows up here. The instant familiarity of the system is a real plus. The connection to your open system, with all of your digital content, is a plus.

The design decisions started with this. It has to be a wonderful gaming device. The controller can’t be sacrificed. We started with the palms of your hands, how everything fit into your hand — the bumpers, the triggers, the buttons. They have to be in the appropriate places. Then we fit all of the technology around it. That’s No. 1. No. 2, it has to be as small as possible, to the point where the volume of this device is approximately a game controller. The reason for that is because if you’re willing to carry a game controller in your bag, then from a volume perspective, you want to carry this in your bag. The third thing, of course, is that the performance has to be amazing.

And then, the magic trick … as a device that is consistent with the way we expect to consume media in the future — wireless, cloud, streaming — those kinds of experiences have to be introduced. Streaming from your PC. We do streaming to your TV. In the future we’ll do streaming from Grid. Not only is this a wonderful game device, but it’s also gaming in a new way, the way that we expect to consume digital content.

GamesBeat: Are you filtering Android content in some ways so that it works with this?

Huang: No, not at all. This is pure Android.

GamesBeat: Some of those games are designed more for touch, though, as opposed to buttons. How does that convert?

Huang: The way we’ll do it is this. Everything will work. But for games that are designed for controllers and also optimized for Shield, we have the Tegra Zone. All of your games in here just work. This is your Android experience. Everything is there. This is your gaming experience. Tegra Zone pops up. You’re playing your games. If, all of a sudden, you got a text and you want to check it out, and if you want to go back to that game, it’s exactly like Android. The behavior is exactly the same if you’re connected to the PC.

GamesBeat: How much of the hard work focuses not just on this but also in the whole ecosystem around it? Like, for a console maker, they have to go round up all the game publishers and game developers to get behind a console some months or years ahead of time.  

Huang: We are perpetually doing that. You know that we work with game developers all over the world to enhance for GeForce or to optimize for Tegra. All of the optimizations that we made for Tegra are in Tegra Zone, and all of those games just showed up. For the last two years, all of the games that we’ve optimized for Tegra have already included controller support. We’ve been preparing for this day. All of those games, the 100 games or so, and the few hundred games in development right now, they’re all being optimized for this.

GamesBeat: How much of this resembles a console business and how much might be different or disruptive to it?

Huang: It’s completely different. That’s a really good question. We’re not trying to build a console. We’re trying to build an Android digital device, in the same way that Nexus 7 enjoys books and magazines and movies. This is an Android device for enjoying games. It’s part of your collection of Android devices. That’s how we think about this device. All of the economics associated with this device are exactly the same. We’re going to have to sell this device based on the value of this device, for people who are enjoying it and finding it useful.

The differences are this. The console, as you know, is proprietary, it’s closed, and it has a razor-and-blades business model. Our business model is open, it’s based on Android, it’s completely familiar to you, and the games range from free to free-to-play with virtual goods and also, of course, to premium games. This is the perfect platform for free-to-play. The free-to-play publisher wants to get their games on as many platforms as possible. Broad distribution is what they’re looking for. Broad distribution isn’t what the console guys are looking for. They’re looking for exclusivity. For us, this is just a fantastic thing we’re doing for that industry. That’s why free-to-play works great for PCs. Free-to-play is going to work great for Android, and if it works great for Android it’s going to work even better for Shield.

GamesBeat: What was going on in your heads during all of this time? People were saying that free-to-play was disrupting everything on Facebook, for instance, or iOS. They said that somebody had to bring this to the consoles and disrupt those $60-dollar console games, but nobody did it. Then things like Ouya started popping up. It seemed like it was taking startups to do something the established companies wouldn’t. You guys are an established company in different ways, partnering with some of those guys. What was your thinking when the opportunity for something like this came up?

Huang: If you talk to Julie at Ouya, she’ll tell you that her best partner in the world is Nvidia. We have hundreds of engineers working on her behalf to realize that game console. We love what they’re doing. But I frankly think that Ouya and that game console could be made by other companies aside from us. We can do it, but other companies can do it too. The reason why I built this device is because only we can build this device.

This device, Shield, has such incredible performance. It’s got the software stack that treats it like a server to stream to television. It treats it like a receiver for servers in the cloud and on your PC. The software that’s necessary to do that is so complicated. No company in the world is going to get it together. We’re going to have to do this. It’s the same technology that I was going to use for GRID anyway. The GRID technology goes into my PC. My PC now becomes a GRID server for this. I put that same technology in Shield. Now Shield becomes a GRID server for television. I’ve got all the technology that I can leverage. It’s very delicate and complicated technology, because it has to work, but it also has to work with very low latency.

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Nvidia chief executive Jen-Hsun Huang introduced the Nvidia Grid Gaming System tonight. That’s a mouthful, but the graphics chip maker says it will enable gamers to play in the cloud in a way that is much more convenient and efficient than can be done today.

It means gamers can log into high-end games on a Smart TV, even though the TV has no serious 3D graphics computing power itself. The game can access technology in a web-connected data center — which Nvidia calls the Grid — to do the computing in the data center, or cloud, and then send the results down to the gamer’s machine, wherever the gamer is playing. This means you could log into a laptop in your hotel room and play high-end games, even though your laptop is a relatively weak machine. The Grid, Huang said, will help fulfill the promise of cloud gaming.

Huang announced the news at the swanky Rain nightclub in the Palms Hotel on the eve of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Nvidia also made it a lot easier for gamers to play their games in the cloud, so that they could access their saved games from multiple devices. Huang said the Grid Gaming System will be able to support 24 users on one computing node. That’s more concurrent users on a server than many other solutions can do, and it makes cloud gaming much more practical.

Nvidia’s partners include Agawi, Playcast, G-Cluster, Cloudunion, Cyber Cloud, and Ubitus. Nvdia’s Grid technology is its first fully integrated system product and it will enable those partners to offer their own cloud-gaming services. The Grid taps a new graphics chip, new infrastructure, and services for the partners, Huang said.

“Cloud gaming is an industry that is about to come to fruition,” he said. “It’s taken us five years to make it possible.”

An Nvidia Grid Gaming System has 20 Grid servers in a rack. That system has 240 Nvidia graphics chips and 200 teraflops, or as much computing power as 700 Xbox 360 game consoles.

PC gaming is bigger than ever, especially with the advent of free-to-play online games, Huang said. But it’s still a hassle.

Nvidia has taken the trouble of understanding all of the complex settings for 3D technology, and it now has the software that simplifies PC gaming so you can just focus on playing the game. The technology, GeForce Experience, automatically detects the hardware in your system and the game you’re playing. It then automatically sets the 3D graphics and other technologies for the best results.

“It comes up with the most beautiful and playable settings that your PC will allow,” he said.

Nvidia will provide the GeForce Experience software with its graphics hardware. The goal is to demystify PC gaming and get users to buy more gaming hardware.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Mobile game developer Machine Zone has hired industry veteran Sim Dietrich as its senior technical director of graphics technologies. His role at the Palo Alto, Calif.-based gamemaker will be to helm the client side of the platform team, helping to speed and scale up game development.

Dietrich formerly worked at OnLive as the manager of the platform, user interface, engineering, and game performance teams. His recruitment means that mobile gaming is headed toward better 3D graphics, and that takes a different kind of talent for companies like Machine Zone (formerly Addmired), which grew up in an age of mobile games with 2D graphics. Dietrich will focus on graphics for upcoming community-based massively multiplayer online mobile games.

“Sim is a legend in the 3D graphics world and will be a tremendous asset to Machine Zone,” said Gabriel Leydon (pictured above), the chief executive officer of Machine Zone. “Adding Sim to our team will help us to evolve our platform and create the most graphically advanced mobile MMO games available.”

Machine Zone has more than a billion registered users of its games, which include Original Gangstaz, iMob 2, and Global War. These are free-to-play titles that generate revenue via virtual goods.

Palo Alto, Calif.-based Machine Zone recently announced that it had raised $8 million. Investors include Menlo Ventures, Anthos Capital, and Baseline Ventures.

The company has gone through some big pivots. Addmired debuted as a Y Combinator startup in 2008 with a Hot-or-Not-style social network dating app. But it pivoted to become one of the first free-to-play mobile game companies and now has rebranded itself as a serious developer. Dietrich has nearly 20 years of experience in software engineering, game design, and 3D graphics technologies at companies such as Composite Studios, Intel Corp, and Nvidia. His name is on a number of patents on technologies including low-latency processing, video processing, shading languages, and antialiasing.

“Machine Zone’s technology is charting new waters in the mobile gaming space,” said Dietrich. “I’m thrilled to help drive this technology further with such a talented team.”

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Major publishers use Adobe’s Digital Publishing Suite (DPS) to craft digital versions of their InDesign print publications for tablets and smartphones. It began when Adobe teamed up with Condé Nast publication Wired to create a digital version of its magazine for the then brand-new iPad. Now many big brands use DPS, including multiple Condé titles, National Geographic, and Wenner Media.

Designers will be most excited about the new Alternative Layout feature, which makes it possible to re-purpose a single InDesign layout for multiple devices without having to start from scratch. They should be able to create one layout for an iPad, then use it for a Kindle Fire, iPhone, or any other screen with a different aspect ratio.

This labor-saving feature is just in time — Adobe also announced that DPS can now publish to the iPhone and iPod touch with its new Content Viewer. The New Yorker was the first publication to show what a magazine designed for the iPhone might look like using the new feature at Adobe’s Digital Publishing Summit in New York this morning.

Sharing is a sticky spot for these digital publications. The full issues usually cost a flat fee, but how do you make money off sharing, especially when audiences are so used to free content shared from websites? When so much traffic comes from articles being posted on Facebook and Twitter, it would be silly to prohibit it altogether. The first stab at a solution is tightly controlled sharing features. Publishers can decide what content is sharable, set up a paywall, and control how many times a person can read articles from an issue before being prompted to buy the app.

Other tweaks to the suite include improved analytics tools, integration with new CS6 custom-animation tool Edge, and a bevy of new fonts in the Adobe library that publishers can use in tablet publications without dropping money on additional licenses and per-use fees.

In addition to the changes, Adobe has landed a big new client, Meredith, which was previously using DPS’s now-neutralized former competitor Woodwing. Meredith publishes Fitness, Better Homes and Gardens, and Parents, and claims it is the largest publisher in the world based on total circulation.

[Editor's note: minor spoilers on game locations]

The one requirement for a Call of Duty game is that it has to run at 60 frames per second on a console. The graphics of the game have to look good, but they can’t slow the game down.

So you would think it would be very hard to make Call of Duty: Blacks Ops II, which is being unveiled today, look any better than Call of Duty: Black Ops from 2010. After all, they’re both running on the Xbox 360, which was introduced in 2005, and the PlayStation 3, which was introduced in 2006.

Happily, the Treyarch team has been able to squeeze  more 3D graphics performance out of the consoles.

“You have to challenge assumptions,” said Dan Bunting, director of online at Treyarch. “We didn’t want to rely on the stuff we have done in the past. We locked ourselves in a room and decided what do we want to take away from the game in terms of technology.”

Treyarch brought together a “strike team which we called the Beautiful Corner team.” That was an affectionate term for a vertical slice program that defines a flow of a map, starting with one corner of the map. They studied the graphics technology and defined what the game would look like. They plotted for four months, and in the end, they wanted to produce “PC quality graphics running at 60 frames per second on a console.”

The performance of consoles is frozen in time because every console has to be the same, and it presents developers with a stable development platform. The PC, on the other hand, evolves every year and can absorb the latest and greatest graphics chips and microprocessors. But a talented programming team can rewrite code so that it runs more efficiently on a console and frees up resources to do more things.

“It’s a simple statement and a big ask,” Bunting said. “Getting PC quality graphics running on a console is tough. A seasoned team can do it, but the graphics are expensive in terms of rendering power. The tricky part is the 60 frames per second.”

Gamers won’t tolerate anything except fast and fluid gameplay and graphics. Immediate responsiveness is what you need when you are in a duel with another player.

After those four months had passed, the team had completed two maps. They have since made other maps now and are now pushing the technology even harder.

Some of the major changes they made were with lighting effects. ”Lighting is the rub that pulls the room together,” Bunting said. “It makes it feel immersive and realistic. Lighting is where we focused our energy.”

One of the upgrades is better high-dynamic range (HDR), which allows for both light and dark elements in the same scene. HDR pulls out more details that you would otherwise miss in a scene with different kinds of lighting and shadows.

Another new element is “bounce lighting,” where light bounces off the ground and illuminates another surface. You can see this kind of lighting if you are looking out at the end of a tunnel. Light from the outside hits the floor, bounces off the ceiling, and creates secondary light sources. In a room with windows, you will see softer shadows.

Techniques are what artists use to accomplish cool visuals, once they have the technology. Bunting showed a map set on an island near Yemen. It has unique trees that have complex branches and leaves. With “vertex baked lighting,” the trees get a very dense interaction of light and shadow.

Ambient occlusion, which is what happens when light bounces around a room a lot, causes some rooms to have really dark shadows in the corners. Light reflects off of weapons in different ways. Particle effects, like motes of dust, bits of ash, or insects flying around add granular details. Sand on the ground will obscure the asphalt on a road. But if you see cracks in the pavement, the sand will fall into those crevices and really look like what you would expect. Rocks on the side of the road have more depth.

“We can do a lot more of these effects in the same scene,” Bunting said.

In the map (dubbed Aftermath) of a destroyed Los Angeles, you see things such as water puddles on the street. Some of those puddles have colorful oil slicks on them. You’ll see many more things happening on a screen at the same time compared to past games, said Mark Lamia, studio head at Treyarch. Even objects in the far background will have visible features, such as a skyscraper on fire in the distance.

In the map, you see a lot of rubble, steel girders, and destruction. The landscape has a lot more detail to render. The artists started working on this level by taking photographs of downtown Los Angeles. The scene is layered with smoke, fires, shadows, sparks from live electrical wires, and sunlight coming through the glass.

“We’re not resting on our laurels,” Bunting said. “We want to create these new experiences for the Call of Duty franchise. We don’t want to take anything for granted.”

[Photo credit: Dean Takahashi]

Check out our other coverage of Call of Duty: Black Ops II:

• First trailer released
• Treyarch unveils Black Ops II, a.k.a. Attack of the Drones
• Treyarch studio head Mark Lamia on taking design risks (interview)
• How Treyarch created realistic human faces
• Creating the sounds of future wars

GamesBeat 2012 is VentureBeat’s fourth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. This year we’re calling on speakers from the hottest mobile, social, PC, and console companies to debate new ways to stay on pace with changing consumer tastes and platforms. Join 500+ execs, investors, analysts, entrepreneurs, and press as we explore the gaming industry’s latest trends and newest monetization opportunities. The event takes place July 10-11 in San Francisco, and you can get your early-bird tickets here.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Gamesbeat: We wanted to do a little session about “This is your life” and capture some remembrances about your career. What was your reaction when you heard you got this award?

Tim Sweeney: I was really impressed. John Carmack was the first tech guy to receive this award and that was a big event in the industry. He has always impressed me from Wolfenstein 3D (one of the first fast-action 3D games on the PC) to everything. I was impressed that I would be recognized for my contributions to the industry. I have done some cool things but certainly I didn’t create an industry like Carmack did. I was really honored to be considered for it.

GB: You’ve always been one of the people at Epic who has been in the background. You’ve got some other colleagues who do a lot more of the talking.

TS: (laughs) Yeah well some folks actually talk a whole lot more than me so I’m grateful for the people like Cliff Bleszinski. He talks about our games and Mark Rein talks about our business strategy. I’m the shy programmer myself.

GB: So that fits with your style. You’ve always been that way?

TS: Yeah. I really take pride in the approach and especially the technical aspect of the work these days. Whenever there is somebody at Epic who is capable of doing something better than me, I let them at it. Starting from the early days where I did everything myself, I have seen my responsibilities diminish one by one as we brought on better people in all areas like game design, management, and art work. My experience with Epic is handing off more and more power to the point where I can just sit back and look at our strategy or technology. I provide guidance without being responsible for any particular part of the company.

GB: But I guess you’ve retained that CEO title over two decades. What does that mean? Are you like a traditional CEO in that sense or are you different in some ways?

TS: Oh gosh. My role is more like a chairman and founder. I am used to overseeing the company’s heritage and our strategy. The CEO role is really divided between (president) Mike Capps, who runs development and marketing, and Jay Wilbur, who runs sales and the business side of Epic. They are both world-class managers. I only take on about 10 or 20 percent of the CEO duties.

GB: What is your focus now then? The technology direction is definitely one of those things you do?

TS: I do three things day-to-day. Epic strategy is about what kind of business we are, what platforms we are supporting, how we are prioritizing engines or development. I help direct the long-term direction of our strategy and technology. In the last decade, I really shifted into the technology side. I wrote the first generation engine and I have never seen the engine since. Especially now. We are working on our next generation of engines and our future hardware. We have a lot of decisions to make about future hardware, editor tools and other features like that. I have been heavily involved with that. And I still do a lot of programming for the research into what our long-term goal is. I still do a lot of external projects with rendering or programming languages. I don’t have any day-to-day programming responsibilities on our engine itself.

GB: So now you’re sort of setting the direction for the engine creators to pursue?

TS: Yeah. Gosh wave about 45 people who are contributing to our engine programming and so it’s a big team. If I were to come in and dabble in that, I would create more trouble than good with the project of that magnitude. Once you get to that size, it takes some serious management. We have a director of engineering that oversees all the programming and certainly he’s responsible for a particular project and features of the engine.

GB: So what, how do you do something like figure out where graphics can go next? If you look at something in a scene, and study how good it looks, how do you figure out how it can look better?

TS: We think really long-term at Epic. Once you get a piece of hardware like the Xbox 360 or the PlayStation 3, it’s up to the individual engineers to figure out how they can push it. But the really important thing that we do long term is work with the hardware manufacturers like AMD, Nvidia and Intel and really talk deeply about their long-term roadmap. Not just what’s coming next year but what’s coming out in two years, five years from now. Where is the industry going to max out? We give each other a lot of feedback and can have considerable impact on their direction.

GB: Yeah I remember that back to the original Xbox where co-creator Seamus Blackley was consulting with you pretty regularly.

TS: One of the cool things about being a leading engine developer is that the hardware guys want to talk to us about long-term plans so we are in sync. The development of the Xbox was a great thing and we have talked with Intel about their long-term CPU and graphics plans. The same with Nvidia. They are really valuable relationships. We run our engine a lot like a hardware company runs its products. At any moment, we are shipping product and we are also programming things that aren’t going to ship to consumers for three to five years. It’s a multi-dimensional effort. It really puts us out ahead of other developers who are working from project to project. That is one of the things that makes Epic unique in the game industry.

GB: You haven’t been shy about voicing your opinion with this guys as well. Like I remember with the Xbox, you were very involved in the choice of the graphics chip. With the Xbox 360, you wanted more main memory in the system. That kind of stuff really matters and that’s where you’re not shy about confronting them when you need to.

TS: Oh yes absolutely. We sometimes take controversial positions when talking to the partners. With each generation, we think really deeply about what it’s going to take to fundamentally distinguish it from the previous generation. We don’t want it just twice as good. We want it dramatically better. We fight really hard with our partners to get there. We do our part on the software side.

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WebGL, as the technology is known, could become a critical technology in giving ordinary web pages a 3D makeover. If it becomes widely adopted and wins support from browser makers such as Microsoft, then 3D could infiltrate a whole new series of web-based apps. Right now, many web sites don’t use 3D graphics because they fear that users don’t have good enough PC hardware to process the 3D. So WebGL is aimed at unleashing a huge sea of graphics innovation on the internet. (Cool demos are here, once you upgrade your browser.)

Neil Trevett, vice president at Nvidia and president of the consortium Khronos Group, said the new technology could lead to a wave of innovation in web gaming, education, training and graphically rich user interfaces. Vlad Vukićević of Mozilla and chair of the WebGL Working Group said that WebGL-based browsers will take advantage of 3D graphics hardware in a user’s machine if it is present.

WebGL is a browser version of  OpenGL, the Open Graphics Library specification developed by Silicon Graphics in 1992. You can run OpenGL applications in a browser today using a plug-in from Unity Technologies. But even that plug-in has to be downloaded once, and in a country with uneven broadband penetration, plug-in downloads are an obstacle to widespread adoption.

With WebGL, browser makers will include new code in their future browser versions. Users can download those updates and then can enjoy the benefits of WebGL, as long as web site creators take advantage of their newfound 3D capability. WebGL brings the OpenGL ES 2.0 graphics functions to HTML5 web pages. That means the 3D graphics could be viewed on PCs, embedded devices, and mobile devices.

As we’ve noted before, OpenGL is currently used for video games and for the slick Mac OS X interface. Your Windows PC already knows what to do with it. WebGL will extend OpenGL by allowing websites and Web-based services to access and control OpenGL through Javascript, the programming language that can be built into Web pages. The new standard will not require anyone to contribute royalties, which is sometimes a condition for new standards. Microsoft has not yet embraced WebGL.

Compliant browsers include Mozilla Firefox 4.0, Google Chrome 9.0, an experimental Opera Build, and Apple Mac OS Safari nightly builds. Khronos is also forming a new WebCL working group to create a standard related to parallel computing, which involves the use of graphics chips to handle non-graphics computing tasks.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

For the first time, Google has a chance at catching up with Apple in the hot tablet computer market. That’s one of the core points I took away from Google’s press event yesterday where it showed off Honeycomb, the next version of its Android software, specifically aimed at tablets. The ball is now in Apple’s court.

If Google can launch its Android 3.0 software without a hitch, then the path will be clear for a bunch of new Android tablets to challenge the Apple iPad. While Apple stands poised to launch its iPad 2 tablet in April, the likelihood is that Apple won’t enjoy as big a lead in 2010. The wild card is 4G service, the speedy wireless broadband links that will dramatically improve the speed of web surfing on tablets.

Last year, Apple crushed all of the competition, selling 14.8 million iPads and taking anywhere from 75 to 95 percent of the market. But Android tablets didn’t really show up until the fourth quarter, when the Samsung Galaxy Tab launched and shipped 2 million units into stores. (The actual sold-to-customers number is in dispute).

Apple had all the advantages, with unique content and lots of apps. It had a superior product, a good user interface that millions of iPod Touch and iPhone users already knew, and the iTunes store that many consumers already knew how to use.

But now Google has shown off many of the details of Honeycomb, the tablet-focused release of Android, and it looks good. The Motorola Xoom tablet displayed 18 cool apps running on Honeycomb. And the new user interface has a number of cool features that Apple doesn’t. You can, for instance, buy an app on the Android Market and it will download over the air to your phone. You don’t have to wait until you sync your device with a computer.

It’s pretty easy to navigate through the apps, thanks in part to fast graphics performance and the subtle use of 3D in the design. Scrolling through web pages and Google Maps is easy. In short, these features mean that Honeycomb goes a long way toward erasing Apple’s edge in its user interface and basic navigation.

As we noted, cool 3D games can now run on Android tablets. And 3D can be extended beyond games, as with the Google Body app pictured at the right.

Right now, there is a shortage of Android apps specifically designed for tablets. Apple has a plethora of beautiful apps, including Flip Board, Epic Games’ Infinity Blade, and News Corp.’s The Daily newspaper. But developers from Disney to Intuit demonstrated their support for Honeycomb this week. And more developers should come thanks to the addition of in-app purchases, which will make paid apps a reality on the Android Market. Developers such as Ngmoco and Disney cited in-app purchases (the ability to buy virtual goods or apps from within a running application) as a critical game-changer for the Android market, which has mostly monetized apps through advertising to date. Before the arrival of in-app purchases, the Android Market was completely broken.

The developer problem will subside over time. After all, on phones, Android has more than 100,000 apps. While Apple has more than 330,000 iPhone apps, its advantages in terms of exclusive content will likely lessen as Android catches up at a pretty fast clip. Also, the big cross-platform app makers such as Zynga, whose Words With Friends app is pictured at right, are committed to making their apps run across several platforms. The iPhone players will be able to play Words With Friends against Android players. That means developers don’t want to be locked down to one mobile platform, and clearly they don’t have to be.

Overall, 2010 should be the year of the tablet because of the arrival of fast dual-core processors such as the Nvidia Tegra 2, which powers the Motorola Xoom and the LG G-Slate. Hopefully, a lot more tablet models will show up by the end of the year. If anything, we’re surprised that so few Honeycomb-based tablets have been announced so far.

That leaves the 4G question as a wild card. If the new Android tablets launch ahead of the iPad 2 and get great access to fast broadband speeds of 4G wireless networks, then those tablets will offer something new that Apple doesn’t. If Apple can offer 4G in a timely way, then it’s kind of an even battle. But the risk is there that Apple will be stuck on 3G networks while Android tablets take advantage of 4G. That would be a losing proposition for Apple, since 4G is so novel.

A lot also depends on what Apple announces. Typically, Apple updates its hardware once a year. That means it will launch its iPad 2 in April and the iPhone 5 in June. It could add some interesting new technologies, such as near-field communications, which will make mobile shopping a much more interesting experience. Apple really has to come up with something great in those new products if it wants to keep an edge.

In any case, we can expect the tablet market to even out. It won’t be lopsided in Apple’s favor anymore, much like the smartphone market isn’t owned by the iPhone.

It’s going to be exciting to watch. And we must remember that there are other players out there jockeying for market share, including Research in Motion, Nokia and its Meego software, Palm (now owned by Hewlett-Packard) and Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7, which is off to a decent start. I’ve included Google’s demo of Honeycomb in the video below.

3DreamTeam  is one of 70 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2010 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After our selection, the companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

With the advent of the popular Google street view and Google Earth, Web surfers are increasingly interested in traveling the world from the comfort of their computer.

3DreamTeam, a technology company based in Moscow, presented Vizerra today at DEMO, taking this remote tourism concept into three dimensions. Its software allows companies to create photorealistic environments and tours, similar to what 3D gamers experience. The resulting 3D presentations can be posted and viewed from a computer desktop or Web browser, and the company is developing an iPhone and iPad platform, too.

Vizerra is being used by travel-industry customers, but 3DreamTeam  has Vizerra-based applications for a number of entities. Museums or historical societies can create tours of, say, the house George Washington grew up in; architects can create detailed 3D models of a building they are working on; education companies can make learning tools for students.

So far, 3DreamTeam has produced 20 projects so far for UNESCO World Heritage Sites, along with product simulations and construction renderings. It has clients across Europe, Russia and the U.S.

The company was founded in 2008 by CEO Arman Gukasyan, and has revenues to date of 1.8 million euros, or about $2.3 million. It has been funded so far by Gukasyan and an angel investor in Russia, and the company has 35 full-time employees.