Just in time for next week’s Game Developers Conference, Intel announced it has finished the software development kit for its “perceptual computing” technology for next-generation computers.

That means Intel is ready for software developers to begin making apps that exploit hardware technologies that it will build into next-generation laptops, tablets, and desktop computers. Intel believes perceptual computing is the next big wave, and it includes face recognition, gesture recognition, voice recognition, and touch-screen technology.

For gestures, it involves close-range hand and finger tracking, face analysis, and augmented reality. This means that the PC will catch up with (and surpass) gesture-controlled games on systems such as Microsoft’s Kinect for the Xbox 360 or the Nintendo Wii U.

Here’s a demo from gesture-software middleware maker SoftKinetic that shows what Intel means by “perceptual computing.” It is a cool illustration of controlling lightning with your fingers. Michel Tombroff, the chief executive of SoftKinetic, also said that his company’s software is now available on Nvidia processors running Android. That means you can now take any Android-based device that runs on a Nvidia Tegra processor and make it a gesture-controlled device.

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If you’re lucky and know where to look, you can see the future in Las Vegas in January. Every year, hundreds of thousands of people clog Las Vegas for an annual orgy of electronic gadgets known as the Consumer Electronics Show. It’s crowded, noisy, and so flooded with TV screens, B-list celebrities, and sparkly cellphone cases that it’s hard to find any real innovation.

But one thing the show is good for is showing the patterns of the tech world over time. A trend begins at one show, and it becomes stronger at the next. Or it fizzles out. This year, LG said more than 70 percent of its TVs connect to the Internet, compared to about 50 percent last year.

You could say that such patterns make CES a cavalcade of copycats who can’t teach you anything. But part of the definition of innovation is building on what others have done before you. CES can help you figure out what’s cool enough to be worth copying. Google’s Project Glass, for example, isn’t a trend yet because nobody is copying the web-connected eyewear, which debuts next year.

If anything, CES gives you perspective on what is working. More than 3,250 exhibitors showed products across a record 1.92 million square feet of exhibits. Looking at those exhibits gives you a glimpse of the future and what should go on sale in the coming months.

We took a couple of stabs at this last year, for CES 2012, once before the show, and once after. We didn’t do so great with a prediction that ultrabooks would breathe new life into laptops. But the two-screen experience materialized in a big way in 2012 as companies linked smartphones, tablets and smart TVs.

And for an even longer perspective, you can go back two years to read our top trends of CES 2011.

Here’s our list of the top 10 trends of CES 2013. Please vote for your favorite in the poll at the bottom.

The mobile generation has become the biggest target audience

When Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer gave up the opening keynote to Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs, it was the changing of the guard. Jacobs had a memorable keynote because it was ridiculed so much, but his theme of “born mobile” was genuine enough. A whole generation of kids are growing up untethered from computers and hooked to their mobile phones instead. They are embracing not just one platform but many. As clumsy and laughable as Qualcomm’s keynote was, it got the basic trend right.

After all, Qualcomm has sold more than 11 billion chips for mobile devices over 27 years. And mobile is leading the way. U.S. homes now have 1.4 tablets per household, compared to 1.2 a year ago. We spend 130 minutes a day with smartphones and tablets, compared to 170 minutes a day watching TV. Expect that to flip. In the U.S., about 44 percent of homes have tablets, up from 1 percent in July 2010. Smartphones are in about 55 percent of homes, compared to 36 percent in July 2010. Jacobs said that 84 percent of people worldwide can’t go a day without using a mobile device. We look at our phones 150 times a day.

Shawn Dubravac, a senior analyst at the Consumer Electronics Association, refers to consumers as “digital omnivores.” This generation isn’t picky. It loves anything tech that works and gets the job done. If you target this mobile market, you have a potential audience of billions, several times larger than the PC audience. This year, larger numbers of companies came to the show knowing that. Next year, they’ll call it the Mobile Consumer Electronics Show. – Dean Takahashi

Fitness and health tech get real

In the cavernous South Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center, three exhibitor regions were clustered together: the Fitness Tech Zone, the Digital Health Zone, and Gaming. Some companies belonged in all three. The show space in Digital Health was up 25 percent from a year ago.

Last year, the realm of fitness counters was the domain of startups. But bigger companies are getting in on the act. The health insurance giant United Healthcare had a “fitness gaming” exhibit where people played Dance Dance Revolution. Clearly, if people are more fit, the health insurance company’s costs go down. Companies with new offerings in fitness gadgets included Fitbit, Withings, BodyMedia, Basis Science, and Hapilabs (maker of the goofy but intriguing Hapi Fork). They were joined by the likes of Bosch, Nike, and others. HealthSpot introduced an interesting Telehealth Kiosk, which takes your vital signs and then allows you to consult with a doctor via remote consultation.

Ariana Huffington, the creator of the Huffington Post, moderated a session with Reed Tuckson of United Healthcare on “The Human Body: The Next Digital Revolution.” That must be a sign that digital health and fitness tech are revving up a hype cycle that could come crashing down. But we’ll bet that the square footage around these trends will be bigger at next year’s show. My own Striiv step-counting app showed I walked about 31 miles at CES across five days. – Dean Takahashi

The user interface is you

CEA analyst Shawn Dubravac also predicted before the show that gesture and voice will join touch as new ways to control devices. New technologies based on gestures and voice are coming from the likes of General Motors, Texas Instruments, Intel, and Nuance. Those controls will be useful in cars, and it is no accident that there are more car makers than ever coming to CES, Dubravac said.

“Over the next 36 months, we will see fundamental changes in voice control and gestures as well,” Dubravac said.

At Intel’s press event, Tobii showed off its “eye recognition” technology, where it would detect whether you spotted Waldo in a Where’s Waldo puzzle image. Meanwhile, Samsung included voice recognition in its smart TVs. And PrimeSense, the maker of the depth camera technology used in Microsoft’s Kinect (the motion-sensing system for the Xbox 360), demonstrated further uses of 3D sensing technology, including sensing what objects consumers inspect on grocery store shelves. Movea, in a demo pictured above, showed how sensors on a dancer could be translated into an entertaining digital animation in real time.

Intel calls this trend “perceptual computing,” and it wants to mash-up all of the input technologies into computers to improve things such as device security. Microsoft’s slogan for Kinect, “You are the controller,” is looking better every day. – Dean Takahashi

3D glasses are undead

LG had perhaps the prettiest booth with scores of big-screen 3D TVs chained together in a giant screen. And Nvidia had showed off its 3DVision goggles for gaming. But all mention of 3D was curiously absent from the lips of the many executives who touted it in years past. Some companies are still working on glasses-free 3D TVs. But the computing power required to produce a separate image for every viewing angle is a huge obstacle to doing glasses-free 3D right. That computing power is better used producing better images. That’s why 4K Ultra HD TVs were hot this year.

3D was a fad aimed at stopping movie piracy or pumping up the box office receipts. 3D made an appearance as a zombie trend, or something that just won’t die, for a few years. TV makers may include it for free in a last-ditch attempt to keep it alive.  But market penetration of 3D TVs topped out at maybe 20 percent or 30 percent. Judging from CES 2013, that market share is going to drop dramatically this year. – Dean Takahashi

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Intel says it is making progress on its “perceptual computing” initiative to make computers more intuitive to control.

Last year, Intel talked about how it wanted to go beyond touchscreens and equip everyday computers such as desktops and laptops with technologies such as gesture control, face recognition, voice recognition, and eye control. This year, those initiatives have all taken shape, said Kirk Skaugen, the vice president of the PC client group at Intel, in a press event at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas today.

Back in September, voice recognition firm Nuance announced it would provide technology for a series of Dell ultrabooks, or thin and light laptops. That fulfilled on promise of perceptual computing.

Intel showed a demo of Valve’s Portal 2 being played with gesture controls, using motion-sensing technology from Sixense. That game shipped last fall, making it possible to play it by waving your hands around in front of a computer.

“Gaming is very interesting, but we can do other things with this technology,” Skaugen said.

For instance, you can hold more interesting video conferences with coworkers. Using a technology from Personify, Intel showed how you can hold a video chat with coworkers and insert their images into the presentation that everyone is sharing. Since each person viewing the presentation can see the expressions of coworkers, they can more easily tell what kind of reaction coworkers are having.

Skaugen also showed that — not only is gesture computing good for computer games — it is also useful for computer security. He said that face-recognition technology using special webcams is coming along. And both face recognition and voice recognition will provide for much better computer security in the future. Skaugen noted that a recent breach of passwords showed that the top password that people use is “123456.” To get around the problem of character-based passwords, Skaugen believes that perceptual computing will provide security that will be hard to defeat.

The game industry saw four different but equally compelling visions of the future this week thanks to Apple, Intel, and a cloud-gaming conference. Nintendo also announced at its event in New York that it would launch its upcoming Wii U game console on Nov. 18. Rarely do we get to see so many visions of gaming side-by-side. What a week! What a diverse industry, moving in so many directions at once. All of the news will be good for gamers, but it remains to be seen whose game business will prosper the most.

Intel kicked it off with a talk about “perceptual computing,” which adds voice commands, face recognition, and gesture controls to the traditional touchscreens, mice, and keyboards as input devices for the personal computer. Perceptual computing enables new kinds of games that you can play up close with your laptop without ever touching it. The technology creates a whole suite of control mechanisms that game developers can exploit however they wish starting next year. Instead of doing silly things in front of our game consoles, we’ll be able to do them in front of our Ultrabooks (thin and powerful laptops). By next year, these technologies should be staples across many laptop models. And after Windows 8 arrives on Oct. 26, touchscreens should become much more common, creating a better market for touchscreen games.

Apple also unveiled its iPhone 5, which has a new A6 processor with twice the visual punch and central-processing unit performance. Electronic Arts’ Rob Murray, showing off the demo of Real Racing 3 above, described the graphics on the iPhone’s fancy new screen as “full console quality.” He demonstrated how you can challenge another player in multiplayer racing even if that player isn’t actually racing. The “asynchronous” play allows you to race against your rival’s performance from yesterday. The screen is a half-inch bigger, and that means the games can now be displayed in widescreen format. Like the iPhone 4 and 4S, the iPhone 5 uses Apple’s retina display. Ge Wang, the chief creative officer at social-music developer Smule, was intrigued by the inclusion of a third microphone for more accurate voice recognition. A better iPhone means goodness for all apps and for games, as well.

The big benefit of a new iPhone and a new, more powerful iPod Touch is that Apple’s game platforms should get into the hands of more people. The company will have to manage the fragmentation on its platform, but it is advancing the computational power of its devices at a far faster rate than other platform owners. That makes life tougher for game developers, who have to move faster and increase the quality of their games. But it serves to expand the gaming market and our appetite for games.

Meanwhile, at the Cloud Gaming U.S.A. event, startups were plentiful. They were both inspired by the success of Gaikai, which Sony acquired for $380 million, and troubled by the downfall of OnLive, which ran out of money and had to undergo a change in ownership at a fire-sale price. I moderated a panel on new cloud-gaming startups, including The Happy Cloud, Kalydo,and Tangentix.

Rather than focusing on improving data center services for cloud games, they’re focused on making downloads better. Kalydo and Happy Cloud deliver progressive downloads, shortening the wait for gamers. Tangentix applies better compression techniques, taking the size of download files down to a third of their original size. Those solutions, particularly when combined together, will enable gamemakers to create games with much larger file sizes — meaning higher quality. Other presenters were bullish on cloud technology. Agawi, Playcast Media, and CiiNow all had compelling announcements. That suggests that a second-generation of cloud gaming will deliver more coolness for gamers and carry on the vision that the original companies had.

Nintendo’s vision is finally fleshed out. Besides the November launch, Nintendo said the Wii U will come in black or white versions and sell for $300 to $350, depending on options. Wii U owners who own games for the Wii’s  WiiWare and Virtual Console services may transfer those games to the new system. Nintendo is making a step into the online world and a new style of “asynchronous play,” where a player with a tablet squares off against one with a regular controller.

Gaming giant Electronic Arts is making games for the Wii U, but it doesn’t consider the console to be one of its highest priorities, according to executive vice president Frank Gibeau. Nintendo shouldn’t be written off. Gibeau himself acknowledged that the Wii surprised everyone with its simple motion-sensing innovation. But he doesn’t think the Wii U is as innovative. As a traditional console maker, Nintendo’s business model is also under assault. In that respect, Nintendo is in the same boat as Intel and Microsoft. It has to do something about Apple and the free-to-play games that are disrupting traditional business.

It’s easy to get depressed about the weak sales, floundering console gamemakers, and the troubles of Zynga and OnLive. A lot of jobs are vaporizing. But this week reminds us that the game industry is always in a state of creative destruction. As some efforts fall by the wayside, new ones appear. And the relentless spread of games into all homes, workplaces, and platforms is something to get excited about. New technology and better games are coming. Perhaps they’re not coming as fast as we all would like in order to help a lot of game businesses, but the market may not be able to absorb all of these changes at the same time. After all, we only have so much lunch money to spend. So we should celebrate the creation of new startups and the arrival of new platforms and think about what next week will bring us.

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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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SoftKinetic grabbed some of the limelight at the Intel Developer Forum as the world’s biggest chip maker showed off “perceptual computing,” or how you can control a computer through hand movements, face recognition, voice commands, touchscreen swipes, or mouse-and-keyboard controls.

The Brussels, Belgium-based SoftKinetic makes gesture-control cameras and software much like the elements used in Microsoft’s Kinect motion-sensing system for the Xbox 360 game console. But SoftKinetic makes technology that can recognize gestures that are anywhere from 6 inches to 3 feet away from a DepthSense camera atop a laptop.

Intel believes that the close-range gesture-recognition technology is ideal for controlling thin and light laptops — dubbed “ultrabooks” — which resemble Apple’s MacBook Airs. SoftKinetic’s technology will be included in the software development kit (SDK) coming in 2013. Michel Tombroff, the chief executive of SoftKinetic, and his team showed us a hands-on demo of the technology. Here’s our video of it on display at the Intel Developer Forum at Moscone Center West in San Francisco.

SoftKinetic shows its close-range gesture control technology for laptops from Venturebeat on Vimeo.

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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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