Nintendo’s Philosophy: Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology (2015)
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Re: Nintendo’s Philosophy: Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology (2015)
#2“ While you may think of virtual reality as the definition of a cutting-edge category, the Oculus Rift’s two most important components are a cheap smartphone screen and a pair of fifty cent lenses. These two withered parts allowed for mainstream pricing ($350) and freed the team to work on peripheral innovations like decreasing latency and refining positional tracking.”
Interestingly, a lot of our tracking and latency related work was withered technology too. We used MEMS sensors that were being made in enormous quantities for mobile phones, and a lot of the latency philosophy came from old concepts of “chasing the beam” in rendering.
Re: Nintendo’s Philosophy: Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology (2015)
#3“ While you may think of virtual reality as the definition of a cutting-edge category, the Oculus Rift’s two most important components are a cheap smartphone screen and a pair of fifty cent lenses. These two withered parts allowed for mainstream pricing ($350) and freed the team to work on peripheral innovations like decreasing latency and refining positional tracking.” Interestingly, a lot of our tracking and latenc…
For me, the use of the Snapdragon 835 in the Oculus Quest seems like a really good example of this philosophy as well. Definitely 'withered' by the time the Oculus Quest was released. Yet it's doing things to a quality that I've never seen it do in any Snapdragon 835-based phone.
Re: Nintendo’s Philosophy: Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology (2015)
#4Fancy literature but in the end it says little. There is a simple way to put it. Sometimes an era has missed some of the innovations it could have done and spends too much time caring only about the core technology but it might be beneficial to stay a little more and innovate on the general design rather than just the core technology.
Re: Nintendo’s Philosophy: Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology (2015)
#5"Withered" is a really weird word to use here since all of these old-and-cheap parts are cheap only because they're massively widely used. I think a better translation would be "commodity parts".
In fact later in the article it says "This was a poor translation of the original, which was much closer in spirit to ‘weathered.’" It seems to me that the use of the term in the headline was deliberately obfuscating clickbait. :/
That said, I always love seeing the ways that Nintendo manages to think outside the box and do genuinely new, fun things with far less.
Re: Nintendo’s Philosophy: Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology (2015)
#6[deleted]
Re: Nintendo’s Philosophy: Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology (2015)
#7“ While you may think of virtual reality as the definition of a cutting-edge category, the Oculus Rift’s two most important components are a cheap smartphone screen and a pair of fifty cent lenses. These two withered parts allowed for mainstream pricing ($350) and freed the team to work on peripheral innovations like decreasing latency and refining positional tracking.” Interestingly, a lot of our tracking and latenc…
For me, the use of the Snapdragon 835 in the Oculus Quest seems like a really good example of this philosophy as well. Definitely 'withered' by the time the Oculus Quest was released. Yet it's doing things to a quality that I've never seen it do in any Snapdragon 835-based phone.
Same can be said about the Switch - the Nvidia Tegra chipset used is absolutely ancient by modern standards, yet in the Switch it's used to much higher quality than in any other device with the same or similar chipset.
Re: Nintendo’s Philosophy: Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology (2015)
#8What strikes me about Nintendo is that their hardware quality is rather lacking. Maybe I'm spoiled by Apple et al., but my Switch feels quite the opposite of premium in the hand.
More to the point of the article, however: while Nintendo does use "withered" technology, perhaps it's too withered. The Switch uses an ARM-based CPU/GPU SoC from 2015: obsolete before the Switch came out! The GameBoy Color, released in 1998, was the first GameBoy to feature a non-monochrome display: a feature the Sega GameGear had, with its 8-bit color and a backlit display, in 1990.
Nintendo seems to be consistently about a decade behind the current standard of technology, but they innovate in such clever and serendipitous ways that their "Ludditism" is easy to forgive.
Re: Nintendo’s Philosophy: Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology (2015)
#9What strikes me about Nintendo is that their hardware quality is rather lacking. Maybe I'm spoiled by Apple et al., but my Switch feels quite the opposite of premium in the hand. More to the point of the article, however: while Nintendo does use "withered" technology, perhaps it's too withered. The Switch uses an ARM-based CPU/GPU SoC from 2015: obsolete before the Switch came out! The GameBoy Color, released in 1998…
That's the point of the article: If you're using "obsolete" or at least older stuff, all the potential unknowns have long been known so everything is much more predictable. That they succeed despite using older tech suggests that the level of the technology isn't the be-all-end-all for many people.
Re: Nintendo’s Philosophy: Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology (2015)
#10“ While you may think of virtual reality as the definition of a cutting-edge category, the Oculus Rift’s two most important components are a cheap smartphone screen and a pair of fifty cent lenses. These two withered parts allowed for mainstream pricing ($350) and freed the team to work on peripheral innovations like decreasing latency and refining positional tracking.” Interestingly, a lot of our tracking and latenc…
While it's beside your [good] point - you can do VR with fifty cent lenses and early headsets did, but the lenses in headsets like Oculus are specialised and still evolving.