Hands-on With the Nvidia Shield Portable Gaming System
Rachel Z. Arndt
The most telling part of the Nvidia Shield is the faux-metal "shield" on the back of the screen. Remove it to reveal the serial number, put it back on to create a color contrast with the hulking black controller (or spend $20 to trick out the Shield with a plate in carbon fiber or black). And that's it. What's the point?
The same can be asked of the Shield itself.
I should admit that, besides a stupendous enthusiasm for MarioKart, I'm not a gamer. I grew up mostly not playing games, and those I did play were usually Tetris or Kirby's Pinball Land on my Game Boy Pocket. So I am not the target audience for a device that promises "the ultimate gaming and entertainment portable." Nevertheless, I tried to like this Android-based portable gaming ... thing. And in some ways I succeeded.
As promised, the Shield is quite powerful thanks to some hefty guts: Nvidia's Tegra 4 processor, a 5-inch 720p touch display, and surprisingly decent speakers. The physical device is ugly, but feels good in the hands despite its 1.28-pound body.
Rachel Z. Arndt
Compared to the Wii U controller, to which it is a rival at least in intent, the Nvidia is much more pleasant to use. The Shield is a near clone of a Microsoft Xbox controller and sports a flip-up screen that is easier to pay attention to than the Nintendo Wii U's between-the-controls screen. The screen itself is better, too—though, like the Wii U's, it makes touch interactions awkward. The Wii U is uncomfortable for the neck; the Shield is uncomfortable for the wrist. Touching a screen that's right in front of you isn't terribly natural (as anyone who has tried a Windows 8 laptop knows)—especially when you can use either the touchscreen or the traditional inputs (in this case, the controller).
Therein lies one of the main problems with the device: Android. Because the device is, most superficially and most obviously, an Android gaming device, it's necessarily meant for touch-driven games, at least for now. Not only are there few compelling Android games, but those that are well-designed are well-designed for touch more so than for traditional inputs. Or they sport mediocre design in both realms. Plus, which are you supposed to use? Both? Games that require touch and traditional video-game controls cause not just physical but intellectual distress. The buttons are closest to the fingers when holding the Shield, so button-driven navigation seems more natural. But the Android operating system is designed for touch, and the introduction of two sets of controls creates a lot of redundancy without a lot of convenience.
The games that work best are those that avoid touch entirely, usually because they're console games that have been adapted for the Shield. Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, for instance, is a joy to play (as long as you're okay with all that violence and misogyny, which do translate wonderfully to the Shield). Classic console games such as Super Mario Brothers can be played with emulators, and they're usually great as well.
Rachel Z. Arndt
As is PC streaming, or so I am told. Given the right computer, router, and Wi-Fi network, you can stream games from your PC to the device. So if you're dying to play a PC game in a room where your PC isn't, or if you're just dying to use the comfortable controls of the Shield, you can—if you have the right setup, that is. PC streaming requires at least an Nvidia GeForce GTX 650 graphics card, Windows 7 or 8, and, preferably, a dual-band router. If, like me, you have only two of those three requirements, you're stuck with what's available in the Google Play and Shield Stores (in the latter, games cost between nothing and $10, with most in the lower end of the price spectrum).
At $300, the Shield still seems a niche device. Android games don't attract too many dedicated gamers, and with smartphones that are nearly as powerful as the Nvidia's, even the fancy chip inside the Shield doesn't make it an especially tempting addition to the technophile's gadget lineup. On the other hand, within the ugly exterior lies a device that is fun in the way the Game Boy is fun.
Leap Motion Launches 3D Gesture Sensor
For the last three decades, we've primarily interacted with our computers using two devices: the keyboard and mouse. Leap Motion intends to change that. Today the company begins shipping its eponymous 3D gesture control sensor, a black-and-aluminum rectangle the size of a pack of gum that lets you control your computer by waving your hands. The $80 device, winner of a 2012 Breakthrough Product Award, opens up the possibility for completely keyboard- and mouse-free computing. Right now, it's better in specific applications, like the 75 available in Leap's web-based Airspace Store. Where the device truly stands to excel, though, is not alone, but in conjunction with the tried and true inputs we're used to.
The Leap Motion's guts are nothing too fancy—two CMOS sensors and three infrared LEDs—but they provide enough data for the tracking of individual finger movements. The device plugs in via USB and is controlled mainly through Airspace, a program that looks like the Launchpad in Mac OS X and displays all the apps installed in the user's account. Those apps may be why it took so long for the Leap Motion to hit the market—at the end of 2012, it seemed like it was just a few months away. But, Leap CEO Michael Buckwald says, "it takes developers time to build content, and we really only have one chance to do this right."
He also cites "the complexity of the product," which, on the user's end, becomes apparent when getting used to physically using it. Though setup is easy (there basically is no setup), successfully controlling what's on screen is a bit more difficult. Moving a cursor with your fingers may be intuitive—it's essentially what we all do on touchscreens—but doing it in the air takes some practice. For one, there's the Leap's field of vision, which is limited by the power it can draw from USB. The bigger hurdle is getting used to interactions that have been translated, for better or worse, straight from keyboard and mouse inputs. Choosing a button that says "start" in a game, for instance, takes longer than clicking on it with a mouse; you have to hover your finger in just the right position, making sure your hand is almost impossibly steady, for a few seconds, as the program registers you're actually intending to hover your finger in that spot.
Other interactions have been translated more successfully. In the New York Times app, for example, you browse and scroll articles by twirling a finger. In Airbeats, you flap your hands around to hit corresponding (that is, corresponding to your hand's position relative to the Leap) drums and cymbals. And moving the avatar in my favorite game so far, Out of the Blocks, is natural: A glide of the hand forward moves the character forward, a glide right moves the character right, and so on. (That game, by the way, is an abstract, trippy success: The avatar is in a world made of blocks, where some of those blocks are buildings, others are buses, and others are villains to be shot with block-bullets.)
Most of the games in the Airspace Store, like most of the applications in general, are fun for a while but end up feeling like novelties. That's not to say the Leap Motion itself is trivial, just that it'll take some time for developers to figure out how best to incorporate gesture controls into their programs. According to Buckwald, the Leap provides "the potential to democratize the more complex things you can do with a computer." In other words, it'll let more people do more. Take CAD, for instance. Autodesk has made manipulating 3D objects wildly natural on the iPad—the company compares it to sculpting with clay, and it's right—but the same doesn't quite exist on computers yet. The Leap Motion seems an ideal (if not the ideal) way to bring the user experience of molding objects on an iPad to a regular—and more powerful—computer.
What the Leap Motion is not ideal for is everything. You still need a keyboard and mouse, and that's fine, because they're really good at what they do. Likewise, the Leap Motion is really good at what it does: 3D gesture control. Sometimes, 3D gesture control is enough to be the sole input, as in Airbeats. But most of the time, it seems better used as a third input, something that works alongside the keyboard and mouse, making all three better than any single one would be alone.
