All you want to know on Nintendo Revolution

First concrete informations on Nintendo Revolution controller

As long as Nintendo Revolution and his controller will be soon presented during the TGS, i will present today the first concrete information on Nintendo controller. I won't do like Osoko Tanaka (or the person who claims he's Osoko...), who makes people believe that he'll say something... But for months, he told you nothing. And all will be over in 3 weeks. Stop kidding.

So, i'll finally present some elements who are the beginning of the whole explanation.

First, many speculations and fakes are on the web for months. But no one is the truth, or even close to the truth. Really none ? No. One is. Or rather, it's half of the whole thing.

I think you all saw that :


This leaked video was a pre-version of the Nintendo IGS (Immersive Game System), the first of the two elements of the controller. The second one is the ICS (Immersive Control System), i'll talk about it later. Man, there's so much to say about Revolution !

The IGS has been designed to allow the player to be in the game, feel what the hero of the game would feel, and see what the hero would see. Of course, Nintendo IGS is not the only part : seeing and feel is good, but how do you play or how do you interact with the game ? The ICS will play his role here.

The hardest thing to develop IGS was to reduce coast, whereas we were using new technologies... Or rather, very expansive technology. This coast notion was a real brake, but we had to deal with it uh ? The IGS allows 3 things :

• Detecting moves of the body.
• Detecting moves of the head.
• Detecting moves of the eyes.

The IGS main unit has to detect body moves. It's done via infrared signals sent around the MU (Main Unit), and sent back to the console. But this is not its only function. It's here to get signals from the IGS PU (Portable Unit) : when you move your head, when your move your eyes, these data go into the IGS MU. How does it work ?

First, move of head. It's important in what direction you look. A direction in a spheric environment is defined by 2 angles, theta and phi. When you switch the IGS on, it gets a frame of reference, a kind of "offset" if you prefer. Then, it can get (theta,phi) values at each time t.

Second, move of eyes. When you look into a direction, you can see a certain field, of some dozens square degrees for example. You can move your eyes in either point of this field, so a second couple of (theta,phi) values is needed. With these 2 couples of data, the IGS can compute the precise direction you are looking at.

Third, move of body. Fine, IGS knows the direction you are looking at. But in a 3D space, you need a third coordinate. This is distance. When you will simulate walk/run, IGS will estimate the distance you do and the distance from you to all other objetcs of the environment.

For playing all these roles, the IGS MU integrates one main CPU for handling signals from the IGS PU, and treating information to send to the Revolution itself. For its part, Revolution really handles and treats signals from IGS PU. The IGS MU integrates 512 Mega bytes of RAM to keep program data. You simply put these data in memory by inserting the disc game a few seconds in the IGS MU drive.

More info to come...

posted by n5_dev @ 7:03 AM