Nintendo Files Patent Application For Weird New Controller
Users of NeoGAF have stumbled on another Nintendo patent, this one for a controller. The patent wasn’t filed directly by Nintendo (they’ve likely learned from recent patents of the past the media caught), but it WAS filed by Masato Kuwahara, a member of Nintendo’s development engineering department…which led to NeoGAF uncovering it. There doesn’t seem to be any real way to prevent these kinds of things, but at least they tried.
Though we can’t say for certain, this might be a design for a controller for Nintendo’s next console, currently codenamed NX. It boasts two control sticks, two shoulder buttons and three additional buttons on each side. And there’s an iguana on it, but according to the patent, this is meant to represent a display screen. How is that possible? I’ll explain….
Last year Sharp, longtime supplier of the screens that go into Nintendo’s devices, announced it had found a way to place the chips that run video screens somewhere other than the bezel (meaning the border outside the screen). Now that bezels were no longer required, Sharp said it could now create screens in all sorts of wacky shapes — circles, trapezoids. even some with holes. That last detail is important when you look at this, because it appears to be a controller and a display at the same time. The controller would show a different design depending on what game you were playing, and perhaps even the buttons would be screens that change. Pretty cool, right? Let’s hope it’s the truth.
Rumor has it Nintendo is preparing the NX for a late 2016 launch.