Next-gen hardware talks from Sony, AMD, Oculus headed to GDC Europe 2013

Mere weeks before GDC Europe 2013, organizers review several key, next-gen and other game hardware talks scheduled for the event, including AMD on powering the graphics for PS4 and Xbox One; Sony on PlayStation 4's shading language; an HD Oculus Rift VR talk and expo floor demo; and Nintendo on Unity, HTML, and JavaScript tools. GDC Europe will take place Monday through Wednesday, August 19th-21st at the Cologne Congress-Centrum Ost in Cologne, Germany -- just ahead of (and co-located with) the massive 275,000 person Gamescom event, with all GDC Europe passes also guaranteeing entrance to Gamescom. In the Oculus VR session 'Virtual Reality Gaming and Game Development', founder Palmer Luckey and VP of product Nate Mitchell will speak about the challenges virtual reality presents for game devs, why VR will change the way games are played, and what VR means for the industry. In addition, the company's product - the HD Oculus Rift VR headset - is currently planned to be playable in a booth on the GDC Europe show floor on Monday and Tuesday, August 19th and 20th, giving attendees the chance to check out the latest demonstrations on the unique hardware. In another emerging hardware talk, Sony's Chris Ho and Richard Stenson are stepping up to present 'PlayStation Shading Language for PS4', a talk that will discuss PlayStation Shading Language, which "enables a degree of cross-compatibility with the PC, but extends far into specific PlayStation 4 hardware extensions that truly unlock features of the PS4 GPU in ways not seen before in this class of modern graphics hardware." For a detailed discussion of the power behind game visuals of the future, AMD developer relations manager Layla Mah's 'Powering the Next Generation of Graphics: The AMD GCN [Graphics Core Next] Architecture' is an extremely useful session. Mah plans to go into low-level detail about the GCN architecture's compute and functional units' capabilities; considering AMD's technology will power the PS4 and Xbox One, this talk should be fascinating for graphics engineers wanting to know how to take advantage of next-generation consoles. Elsewhere, in the first of Nintendo of Europe's (NOE) two vendor-presented sessions on developing for their own game hardware, 'Nintendo Wii U Application Development with HTML and JavaScript,' NOE's own Svyetoslav Pidgornyy and Martin Buchholz "will introduce a new way of rapidly developing Wii U applications that takes full advantage of unique Wii U features while reducing development times significantly." The second vendor session, 'Unity, Wii U and You,' will feature NOE senior software engineer James Steele and Unity core team developer Wayne Johnson, presenting "everything from technical advantages of using Unity to develop your Wii U titles, to the process of getting your title published on the Wii U." Attendees can plan ahead for these and the other 80-plus lectures using the online schedule builder, and they can also browse the companies which will appear in the GDC Europe Expo using the current floor plan. Online registration for GDC Europe is still available, with individual savings for VIP and All Access Passes compared to onsite prices. Group admission discounts are also available. For all the latest news on GDC Europe, subscribe for updates via Facebook, Twitter, or RSS. Gamasutra and GDC are sibling organizations under parent UBM Tech.