Nintendo Revolution controller !?!


Recommended Posts

http://money.cnn.com/2005/09/15/commentary...lution/?cnn=yes

post-60622-1126868374.jpg

post-60622-1126868382.jpg

NEW YORK (CNN/Money) ? Ending months of speculation, Nintendo has begun to unveil the 'revolutionary' aspects of its next generation video-game system - code-named Revolution.

Rather than playing the next "Mario" or "Zelda" game with a two-handed controller, you will use a device that more closely resembles a television remote control. The wireless unit, using internal sensors, will translate your wrist and hand movements into onscreen actions.

"This is an extremely exciting innovation -- one that will thrill current players and entice new ones," said Nintendo president Satoru Iwata in a statement.

"For the fist time, a controller will allow you movement in every direction," Reggie Fils-Aime, executive vice president of sales and marketing for Nintendo of America, explained to me. "Obviously left and right, but you can also move in and out, pitch and yaw."

Because it's so different than what the gaming world has seen for the past 20 years, it's hard to explain precisely how the Revolution's controller works. It fits in your hand much like any remote control, with one button easily accessible with your thumb. A second button, which is more like a trigger, is underneath the remote and can be used with your index finger.

While it will chiefly rely on those internal sensors to reflect movement on screen, the controller does have a D-pad, which can be easily reached with your thumb. (A D-pad, which is a standard feature on today's controller, is a movement director that resembles a plus sign.) Developers, ultimately, will decide how often that feature will be used in titles.

"What I believe many developers will choose to do is take full advantage of the telescopic and movement aspects of this controller and make it so games are not very button dependent," predicted Fils-Aime.

Nintendo was not expected to show any next generation game demos at Iwata's keynote speech Friday morning at the Tokyo Game Show, but Fils-Aime described a couple of scenarios being shown behind closed doors.

Imagine a game that simulates the fly-fishing experience. Using one of today's standard controllers, you'd likely press a button once to begin casting, then press it again to retrieve your line. Using the Revolution's controller, you'll actually mimic casting a fly rod.

Another example: You're playing a first person shooter (perhaps the latest "Metroid" game). The controller would act as a virtual pistol in your hand, letting you point at and shoot objects on screen, using that aforementioned trigger button near your index finger.

"It is very responsive to the way your hand or wrist moves," said Fils-Aime. "Frankly, that's why developers have responded so enthusiastically to this. The hand motion is very straightforward but the possibilities of what you can do are quite mind-blowing."

The controller also supports a variety of expansions and auxiliary devices. Nintendo released a photo showing an auxiliary thumbstick (a standard on current controllers), which the company said would add enhanced control to appease hard-core gamers. (Gamers, summon that same "Metroid" session in your head. The thumbstick would be used to control character movement, while the Revolution controller would be used for targeting and firing your weapon.)

While the controller appears to use gyroscopes of some sort to gauge your hand and wrist movement, Nintendo said it would not discuss the details of how it works in an effort to prevent competitors from copying the design.

"Game control is essential ? it's the area where perhaps the most game-play improvement can be made," said John Schappert, Sr. Vice President and General Manager of Electronic Arts (Research) Canada in a written statement. "While our portfolio represents a full array of titles across all genres, I think our sports titles might be the first to immediately take advantage of what this novel 'freehand' type of control has to offer."

Nintendo first discussed the Revolution in May at the E3 trade show. The system, due out in 2006, will only be as thick as three stacked CD cases. It will be backward compatible with GameCube games and owners will be able to download (and play) virtually every game the company has created for the NES, SNES and Nintendo 64.

The system will be wi-fi enabled, said the company, allowing owners to play others for free. No titles have been announced for the Revolution yet, but Iwata did say at E3 that work is underway on both "Zelda" and "Mario" games as well as a version of Square Enix's "Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles."

Link to comment
https://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/372895-nintendo-revolution-controller/
Share on other sites

This topic is now closed to further replies.
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
  • Posts

    • GitHub removes manual model selection from Copilot free and student plans by Karthik Mudaliar GitHub is removing the ability to manually select an AI model from its Copilot Free and Student plans, making its automatic routing system the default and only way to choose a model. This means users on these tiers will no longer be able to deliberately select a particular OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, or Microsoft model for a task. In its announcement, GitHub said Copilot Auto will dynamically choose what it considers the best model for each request. Free and Student accounts will retain access to models from multiple families, although the available selection will continue to depend on the restrictions attached to each plan. GitHub did not identify a fixed pool of models that Auto will always use, and its documentation warns that model availability can change over time. GitHub describes Auto as more than a random fallback system. On supported surfaces, its task-optimization technology evaluates the complexity of a request alongside real-time information about model health and availability. Straightforward prompts can be routed to faster and less expensive models, while more demanding coding tasks may be sent to higher-cost reasoning models. The company says this approach should reduce rate limiting, latency, and failed requests. Auto generally selects one model along natural prompt-caching boundaries rather than repeatedly switching models during a session, as GitHub found that mid-session changes increased costs without producing sufficient improvements in output quality. Users can still check which model generated a response. In Copilot Chat, the information appears when hovering over an answer, while Copilot CLI and the Copilot cloud agent display the selected model alongside their output. Auto is available in Copilot Chat, Copilot CLI, and the cloud agent, with the exact implementation and release status varying between supported development environments. The latest restriction follows several months of adjustments to Copilot’s individual plans. GitHub temporarily halted new Pro, Pro+, and Student subscriptions in April as it sought to manage demand and service reliability. It later introduced token-based billing and began gradually reopening individual-plan registrations on June 17. Alongside the picker change, GitHub is retiring the “Preview” label from Microsoft-developed models. It argues that the label is no longer necessary because Auto handles model routing and models are continuously updated behind the scenes.
    • Look up 'inflation' kid. Ask an AI for the numbers between both games.
    • Google reportedly set to lose two key Gemini and DeepMind researchers to Anthropic by Karthik Mudaliar Google is reportedly preparing to lose two more prominent artificial intelligence researchers, with Gemini contributors Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel planning to join rival AI developer Anthropic. According to a report from Bloomberg, both researchers are viewed internally as important contributors to Google’s flagship Gemini model family. Adler worked on Google’s AI coding efforts, while Pritzel was involved in the process used to train AI systems. Neither company has publicly confirmed the moves. The report also does not say when the researchers will formally leave Google or what positions they will hold at Anthropic. Training a large AI model requires decisions covering its architecture, data preparation, distributed computing infrastructure, and post-training methods that shape how the finished system behaves. Researchers with experience operating at the scale of Gemini are consequently difficult to replace quickly. Both Adler and Pritzel have previously contributed to Google DeepMind’s scientific research as well. They are listed among the authors of the company’s work on expanding AlphaFold protein-structure predictions across entire proteomes, alongside AlphaFold researchers including John Jumper. The reported departures arrive shortly after another important change within Google’s Gemini organization. Gemini co-lead Noam Shazeer is leaving Google for OpenAI, after returning to the search company in 2024 through its deal with Character.AI. Shazeer is particularly well known as one of the authors of the Transformer paper, whose architecture became the foundation for most modern large language models. Anthropic, meanwhile, has been recruiting recognizable figures from other leading laboratories. OpenAI co-founder and former Tesla AI director Andrej Karpathy joined Anthropic’s pre-training team in May. His move, followed by the reported recruitment of several Google researchers, suggests Anthropic is strengthening the research teams responsible for the core capabilities of future Claude models rather than concentrating solely on product and enterprise sales. The competition is complicated by the companies’ extensive commercial relationships. Anthropic competes directly with Google’s Gemini models, but it also relies on Google as an infrastructure partner. In April, Anthropic announced an expanded agreement with Google and Broadcom covering multiple gigawatts of next-generation Tensor Processing Unit capacity. TPUs are Google-designed accelerators used to train and run large AI models. via Bloomberg
    • This article makes my head hurt. Lots of confusing words
    • Google adds built-in computer control to Gemini 3.5 flash by Karthik Mudaliar Google has added Computer Use as a built-in tool in Gemini 3.5 Flash, giving developers a single model that can reason about a task and operate graphical interfaces across browsers, mobile devices, and desktop environments. The feature is available through the Gemini API and Google’s Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, although it remains a preview feature for now. Computer Use enables an AI agent to examine screenshots and return actions such as mouse clicks, scrolling, and keyboard input. A developer’s application must execute those actions, capture the resulting screen, and send it back to Gemini, creating a continuous loop until the task is completed. Google says the integration can be used for activities including repetitive form filling, application testing, research across multiple websites, and longer enterprise workflows. Gemini 3.5 Flash can work with browser, mobile, and desktop environments, whereas Google’s earlier standalone Computer Use model was primarily positioned around browser interaction. The main change is consolidation. Computer control was previously offered through the separate Gemini 2.5 Computer Use preview model. As Neowin reported when that model was introduced, it was designed to interpret a visual interface and generate actions without requiring a website-specific API. Google later brought Computer Use to preview versions of Gemini 3 Pro and Gemini 3 Flash in January 2026. The latest release now incorporates the tool into the stable Gemini 3.5 Flash model rather than requiring developers to select a specialized model solely for interface automation. Gemini 3.5 Flash itself was announced in May as Google’s latest fast model for coding and multi-step agent workflows. It supports a one-million-token input context window and up to 65,000 output tokens, along with adjustable thinking levels that let developers trade additional reasoning for lower latency and cost. Google also added that Gemini 3.5 Flash received targeted adversarial training for computer-use scenarios. The company is also offering safeguards that can require user confirmation before sensitive or irreversible actions and automatically stop a workflow when suspected prompt injection is detected. Its developer documentation describes configurable protections for areas such as financial transactions and changes to sensitive records. Google isn't the first to bring Computer Use to its platform. Anthropic has made computer control available through Claude, while OpenAI has continued improving computer-use performance in its recent models. Microsoft has also applied the concept to business workflows, including a Computer Use capability for the Researcher agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot.
  • Recent Achievements

    • Dedicated
      Scoobystu earned a badge
      Dedicated
    • First Post
      Tom Schmidt earned a badge
      First Post
    • One Month Later
      D0nn13 earned a badge
      One Month Later
    • Rookie
      +ChiefOfNeo went up a rank
      Rookie
    • One Year In
      Tom Schmidt earned a badge
      One Year In
  • Popular Contributors

    1. 1
      +primortal
      463
    2. 2
      +Edouard
      177
    3. 3
      PsYcHoKiLLa
      124
    4. 4
      Michael Scrip
      79
    5. 5
      Xenon
      76
  • Tell a friend

    Love Neowin? Tell a friend!