Star Wars Battlefront, Battlefield 4, Beyond Good and Evil 2 and so many other games that have been rumored to come to Nintendo’s next console hybrid. But what of the hardware? At least some patents suggest that there will be a Nintendo NX handheld featuring things like infrareds and gesture recognition.
Lets roll back a little, Nintendo registered some patents with the USPTO – the same were registered in Japan a while ago too – that showed off the company is working on some sort of a new handheld.
Since we are close to the launch of Nintendo NX, and there are tons of solid speculations that it is going to be a hybrid of handheld and home console, it sounds natural that these patents are for the Nintendo NX handheld part. Here’s an excerpt from the description of the patent for infrareds:
A non-transitory storage medium encoded with a computer readable image processing program is provided. The image processing program causes a computer to perform functionality including obtaining an infrared image of a subject and determining a position of the subject included in the infrared image based on brightness and a size of a prescribed region of the subject within the infrared image.
This one refers to the supposed Nintendo NX handheld:
An exemplary portable electronic apparatus includes a display provided at a front surface, and an infrared camera and a distance measuring sensor which are provided at a side surface. When a user holds the portable electronic apparatus with their left hand and makes a gesture with their right hand, the portable electronic apparatus analyzes an image from the infrared camera to detect the gesture made by the user. The portable electronic apparatus displays an image corresponding to a result of detection of the gesture on the display.
There is no guarantee that this will be the handheld that accompanies the console, but nothing else would sound appropriate.
