“It’s going to be a really powerful handheld game console,” said Asbjoern Soendergaard, founder and chief executive officer of Tactile Entertainment. “It’s going to be an awesome gaming experience.”

Soendergaard’s Denmark-based company is building a pet simulation game for the iPhone called “Pocket Creatures” and he said the iPad will allow the game developers to add “features that we only thought we could a year ago.”

The iPad’s larger screen, rich graphics and processing power has videogame and application developers around the world racing to put the final touches on programs for the iPad in time for when it hits the stores next month.

Free and paid applications for the iPhone — more than 150,000 to date — helped make the smartphone a smash hit and developers are hoping for similar success with the iPad, which goes on sale in the United States on April 3 and in nine other countries at the end of the month.

“We’re very excited about the iPad because it gives us more room to play,” said Brian Meehan, the head of worldwide product development at Sourcebits, a company focused on mobile applications and gaming with offices in Atlanta and Bangalore, India.

“It’s got a larger screen obviously and more CPU,” Meehan said of the iPad’s central processing unit, what Tactile’s Soendergaard described as the “power under the hood.”

Besides games, one of Sourcebits most successful products is “Knocking Live Video,” which allows iPhone owners to share live video with each other and has attracted over 750,000 users in just three months.

“We’ll ultimately build that out for the iPad,” Meehan said.

“For gaming, the iPad’s going to be kind of in a bit of a world of its own,” he added.

“If you look at Sony’s PSP and all the other portable gaming devices they may be a little bit bigger than the iPod Touch or the iPhone but they’re all in that same size area.

“Now you have this device that’s also going to be able to connect to (the Internet),” he said. “That in itself is a big playing field for everybody in the gaming world.”

Soendergaard said the iPad is “different from the iPhone where you have your personal apps” and predicted it will be “a family device, a shared device.

“On the multi-player side it’s going to be really exciting,” he said. “Maybe you can play board games on it.”

Mike Rasmussen of Durham, North Carolina-based Republic of Fun, publisher of “Slug Wars” and other iPhone titles, agreed, saying the iPad opens up all kinds of new possibilities for game makers.

“It’s about the right size to place down on a table between four people,” said Rasmussen, whose title at Republic of Fun is “el presidente” in keeping with the name of his company.

“We’ve really started thinking about it as kind of the ultimate board game device which can create really interactive, fun, multi-player experiences for groups of people that just are not possible on a device like the iPhone.”

Game makers are not the only ones bullish about the iPad. So are financial analysts and application developers.

“We were able to demo the (iPad) at the launch event and were impressed by the gaming and e-book experience in particular,” said Ben Reitzes, an analyst at Barclays Capital.

“We found the gaming experience to be far superior to the smaller screen platforms and wouldn’t be surprised if gaming popularity turned out to be one of the gadget’s big surprises,” Reitzes said in a research note on Friday.

PointAbout, a Washington-based technology company which has built iPhone applications for the White House, the US Coast Guard and The Washington Post among others, is looking to adapt its popular AppMakr service to the iPad.

AppMakr can make iPhone applications for as little as 199 dollars and has been used to build 3,800 iPhone programs in just the six weeks since it was launched, said PointAbout co-founder and chief operating officer Daniel Odio.

“We will probably end up adding iPad into AppMakr so that people can build low-cost iPad apps,” Odio said. “I imagine it’s going to take us three to six months to do that but it is our goal.”

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In 2009 the industry raked in nearly 26 billion yuan ($3.8 billion), up 39.5 percent over the previous year, according to government data. But experts say the booming market will mostly benefit home-grown firms, whose products are more closely tailored to the tastes and preferences of the more than 380 million people using the Internet in China.

“Foreign game developers are having a tough time competing in China,” said Daniel H Vlad, a senior analyst specialising in the online games and e-commerce sectors for research house JLM Pacific Epoch in New York. “So far only one Western game, World of War craft, has really succeeded in China. Chinese users spend significantly more time playing games than their Western counterparts. Foreign games typically fail to deliver enough content. Chinese gamers eventually lose interest and move on,” he added.

The online games sector is charging ahead thanks to the exponential growth of China’s web community, now the largest in the world. Cheap computer products and relatively inexpensive Internet access have also fuelled the trend. The online market research firm iResearch says the sector will remain “at the heart of the Internet economy” for years to come, with annual growth of about 20 percent. afp

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Chavez, in his weekly radio-TV show “Alo Presidente,” called on Venezuelan manufacturers to make “educational” toys and dolls with indigenous peoples’ features to replace capitalistic counterparts like the Barbie doll that “have nothing to do with our culture.”

In expanding on his dislike of western toys and games — he already slammed Nintendo for promoting “selfishness, individualism and violence,” Chavez Sunday took on the world’s top selling game console, Sony’s PlayStation.

“Those games they call ‘PlayStation’ are poison. Some games teach you to kill. They once put my face on a game, ‘you’ve got to find Chavez to kill him.’”

The firebrand leftist president said any game that “bomb cities or just throw bombs,” are sold by capitalist countries to sow violence so they can “later sell weapons.”

They “promote the need for cigarettes, drugs and alcohol so they can sell them. That’s capitalism, the road to hell,” he added.

Venezuela, Chavez said, should be making “educational games,” and suggested designing “little indigenous dolls” to sell in place of dolls “like Barbie, that have nothing to do with our culture.”

Venezuelan lawmakers in October passed a law outlawing the sale of “bellicose” games and videogames that can be punished with up to five years imprisonment.

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The flying saucer-like AR.Drone — AR stands for augmented reality — caused a sensation when it was revealed to an unsuspecting world at a trend-setting consumer electronics show in Las Vegas last week.

This week its creators gave AFP a demonstration near their company’s offices on the Canal Saint-Martin in Paris, where the “quadricopter” perplexed and impressed passers-by on a cold winter afternoon.

One of the 10 engineers who spent four years developing the drone tapped a button on his iPhone to lift it off the ground and make it hover near the dark waters of the canal.

Then he tilted the phone forward or sideways to make it manoeuvre around nearby trees and park benches.

The machine’s four propellers whirred quietly as it moved through the air, its camera streaming live video from two cameras, via wi-fi, to the pilot’s phone.

The drone moves at 18 kilometres (11 miles) per hour, can stay airborne for 15 minutes after a 60-minute battery charge, has a maximum range of 50 metres (yards), and weighs just over 300 grams, or half a pound.

Its automatic flight stabilization makes it far superior to any other flying toys currently on the market, the company boasts.

“We used very sophisticated technology to develop it — technology that is used in military and commercial drones,” said Henri Seydoux, the founder of Parrot, the company that makes the toy.

The AR.drone is fun to pilot and would probably be a huge hit if it did nothing else but fly around and astonish onlookers.

But its creators have much bigger plans for it: video-gaming.

They insist this is their only motivation and that they have no interest in having their machine used for aerial photography, spying or anything else.

Back inside their offices, the Parrot team proudly displayed their machine’s capacities.

An engineer sent the drone into the air and as soon as its cameras spotted targets he had set up around the room, these were transformed on the iPhone screen into virtual robots at which he could then fire missiles.

Placing a beacon that serves as a target on other drones permits two or more players to engage in aerial combat indoors or outdoors.

This is the augmented reality aspect — merging the physical world with the virtual world.

“This drone will let kids play games not only on their computers but in the garden, the country, or on the beach,” said Seydoux of Parrot, which employs 450 people and has previously specialized in hands-free wireless systems.

“A child can pilot it. I wanted to make something that is both very easy to use and safe,” he said.

The augmented reality gaming his engineers displayed was basic, but they point out the the AR.Drone is built on an open platform and the company is inviting outside developers to create games for the device.

The prospect of augmented reality robot battles is causing much excitement in the gaming world. Gaming websites have been awash with comment since the AR.Drone hovered over the heads of awed visitors to the Las Vegas tech show.

The Games Blog of Britain’s Guardian newspaper said its prediction was coming true that “we’ll all one day be indulging in real-world death matches, commanding robotic slaves into battle on the streets of our towns and cities, as we control the carnage via our computers.”

Augmented reality applications already exist in the fields of medicine, defence, navigation, education, and in gaming.

But many observers are touting the AR.Drone as heralding the next big thing in the world of video games, which in 2009 was worth more than 50 billion dollars (35 billion euros) worldwide, according to industry figures.

But gamers will have to be patient. Parrot says only that their drone will go on sale some time this year, and they refuse to confirm the price of 500 dollars that has been bandied about in the press.

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