Hasta La Gadget!

Manufacturing of the aging Wii game console will end “soon,” Nintendo of Japan says. Kotaku spotted the note on a product page for the Wii on Nintendo’s website, which reads “Manufacturing is scheduled to end soon.” It’s unclear if this affects worldwide production or just Japan, but we’ve asked Nintendo for more info.

The news doesn’t come as a huge surprise, though, as Nintendo’s new game console comes with the ability to play Wii games built-in. A recent update even added the ability to play said Wii games directly on the Wii U gamepad screen — the main selling point of owning a Wii U. It also doesn’t hurt that tens of millions of Wiis are already out there in the world, Nintendo having finally sated the years-long demand for the seven year old console.

Filed under: Gaming, HD, Microsoft

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Via: Kotaku

Source: Nintendo of Japan

Now that Nissan’s partially automated Leaf has the proverbial green light to traverse some of Japan’s roadways, we figured we’d place our lives in the hands of various computer systems in order to have one whisk us around a test track at CEATEC. This year’s autonomous Leaf demo was a step up from last year, with our test vehicle trained to not only stay between the lines, but also pause and evaluate the situation when faced with a fellow car.

An on-site representative informed us that off-the-shelf PC components are being used to calculate its motions at the moment, and yes, it’s a Windows-based system underneath (for now, anyway). A suite of prohibitively expensive lasers keep the car from veering outside of its lane, while onboard processing determines whether a stopped or slowed vehicle is passable or not. The company has tested the automated Leaf at speeds as high as 70 kilometers per hour, but we barely broke 15 on the track. Speaking of which, you can catch a bit of footage from our ride just after the break.

Mat Smith and Richard Lai contributed to this report. %Gallery-slideshow99622%

Filed under: Transportation

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Elliptic Labs has already spruced up a number of tablets by adding the ability to gesture instead of make contact with a touchpanel, and starting this week, it’ll bring a similar source of wizardry to Android. The 20-member team is demoing a prototype here at CEATEC in Japan, showcasing the benefits of its ultrasound gesturing technology over the conventional camera-based magic that already ships in smartphones far and wide. In a nutshell, you need one or two inexpensive (under $1 a pop) chips from Murata baked into the phone; from there, Elliptic Labs’ software handles the rest. It allows users to gesture in various directions with multiple hands without having to keep their hands in front of the camera… or atop the phone at all, actually. (To be clear, that box around the phone is only there for the demo; consumer-friendly versions will have the hardware bolted right onto the PCB within.)

The goal here is to make it easy for consumers to flip through slideshows and craft a new high score in Fruit Ninja without having to grease up their display. Company representatives told us that existing prototypes were already operating at sub-100ms latency, and for a bit of perspective, most touchscreens can only claim ~120ms response times. It’s hoping to get its tech integrated into future phones from the major Android players (you can bet that Samsung, LG, HTC and the whole lot have at least heard the pitch), and while it won’t ever be added to existing phones, devs with games that could benefit from a newfangled kind of gesturing can look for an Android SDK to land in the very near future.

Mat Smith contributed to this report. %Gallery-slideshow99597%

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile, Google

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Source: Elliptic Labs

Wearables are coming and DoCoMo wants to be involved from the start. Here at CEATEC, the carrier has dedicated a quadrant of its booth to prototype wearables (at least some of it was Vuzix hardware), with several different demo sessions offering glimpses into how it all might work. First, however, the wearable itself. We saw several different models and many had Vuzix written somewhere on them. It appears that NTT DoCoMo has been working more closely on the software interfaces and real world applications, and so it didn’t really push (or even mention) technical specifications.

On the “Space Interface” demo, however, the headset paired a camera with an infrared sensor, both in the middle of the device, to gauge where your hands are. You could then interact with characters on screen, poke, push and pick them up and move ’em around. These are very early concepts, but DoCoMO’s already working to make these virtual objects shareable, allowing multiple people to manipulate the same thing. Darren embarrasses himself while playing with a virtual bear after the break. Oh, and we’ve got more on the wearable too. %Gallery-slideshow99595%

Filed under: Cellphones, Wearables, Mobile

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Source: NTT DoCoMo

“Too much bezel” — how often have you seen that complaint in the comment section of new phone announces? Well, you can throw this Sharp Aquos Phone Xx (and its mini companion) in the face of that haterade brigade because 80.5 percent of its 5.2-inch front is all screen. At 70 x 132 x 9.9mm, the Xx is more compact than Sony’s rival 5-inch phablet, the Xperia Z1, but its collection of top shelf specs gives it a fatter profile. The Android device, which joins Softbank’s 4G LTE lineup this December, crams a 1080p display, 2.2GHz Snapdragon 800 running Jelly Bean 4.2, 2,600mAh battery and a 16.3-megapixel rear camera (with an f/1.9 lens) into that squat, water-resistant frame. It also features pre-loaded translation software to make sense out of captured English text — handy if you’re, you know, Japanese. We realize this is an unfair mobile tease for those of you green-eyed monsters living in the Western world; you’ll likely never see the Xx make that transcontinental trek. But it’s always nice to dream.

Filed under: Cellphones, Wireless, Mobile

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Source: Sharp, Softbank (Translated)