Hand controllers not needed for next Wii

Intel tech chief signals the future

17 December 2007 9:11 GMT / By Katie Scott

A top member of management at Intel has suggested the next incarnation of the Nintendo Wii will not have hand controllers.

Justin Rattner, the company's chief technology officer, told Business Week magazine: "We imagine some future generation of [Nintendo's] Wii won't have hand controllers".

He went on to suggest that camera technology would replace the hand controllers using sensors around a room to detect the movements of the Wii players.

He explained: "You just set up the cameras around the room and wave your hand like you're playing tennis".

The interview marked a series of discussions that the microchip manufacturer has set up with leading games and computer manufacturers including Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo.

In particular, Intel has been carrying out discussions with these companies as to which chips might power the next round of consoles.

According to Business Week, Intel is keen to be involved in the next generation of games systems after it lost out to IBM for the current models.

In the interview, Intel claims that its newly developed microchips are capable of one trillion calculations per second.

This is to be compared with the current IBM Cell processor, which is capable of running at around 256 million calculations per second.