This is the episodic story of my life, and a peek into my mind. I have other blogs for my video game programming and Afro-Carribean narratives, but here we can just free style and turn my life into a sitcom!
Expect to hear a lot about God, video games, anime, music, girls and basketball!
The video game industry, when it comes to hardware, has its own unique ecosystem. Unlike phones, tablets and computers, which typically have a new iteration in a hardware series annually, it takes an average of 6 years before new video game hardware is released. The 8th generation of game consoles began last year with the release of the Wii U, and will go into full swing this month as the other two major players release their consoles: The Playstation 4 (November 15th in the US and Canada, November 29th in the UK, and February 22nd 2014 in Japan) and the Xbox One (November 22nd everywhere). If you're thinking of buying a new console during the 2013 holiday period, here are the most important factors to take into consideration before picking which one to buy.
IGN.com's Mash Up of the controllers for all three 8th Gen Consoles
The Wii U cometh, and verily it mayest become the most important device in thine living room, second only to the TV! What am I talking about? I'm guessing that most people that follow gadget and video game websites know almost everything I'm going to say here, so they probably won't click on this particular article on my blog anyway. This article isn't for those that visit Engadget and IGN every other day. It's for those that saw the title of the article and thought "what?!?" so I'm going to write this article with the assumption that my reader has absolutely no clue what a Wii is, talk less of what the Wii U is.
What is the Wii U?
The Wii U is Nintendo's latest game console and is the successor to their Nintendo Wii. It is the first 8th generation game console (the Wii, PS3 and Xbox360 are all 7th generation consoles). Much more than just gaming, it offers the most complete infotainment choices from a single non-mobile device since the desktop computer, and is better suited to the living room than your PC is. The Wii U's unique feature is it's Gamepad, which has a capacitive touchscreen built in, making the Gamepad look like a tablet with the usual buttons and analog sticks expected on a video game controller. In this article, I will focus mainly on the non-gaming features of the Wii U to show you why I believe that more than just being a game console that is booted only for gaming, this may soon become as common in most living rooms as the TV already is.
This video shows off most of Wii U's features, gaming and otherwise
This is the coolest thing I've seen all year! Some guy called Taylor Veltrop uploaded this video to youtube with this caption:
"This is the culmination of my last year's work. I control the robot's
arms through the Kinect and Wii remotes. I control the robot's
navigation through the Kinect and treadmill. I control the robot's head
through the head mounted display (HMD). I also see through the robot's
eyes with the HMD.
After doing this exercise, it became apparent
that the next feature to add is hearing and speaking through the robot.
Luckily both the NAO and my HMD have microphones and speakers so this
shouldn't be too difficult.
This was the second try accomplishing
brushing the cat. On the first try we discovered that the positioning
of the brush in NAO's hand needed to be flipped 180 degrees from the
intuitive direction."
The video speaks for itself:
