Yesterday Apple sent out official invites for a media event to be held in San Francisco on September 9th, where they’re expected to introduce the new models of iPhone and possibly several other things. One of the biggest rumors surrounds a completely revamped Apple TV. As I joked in the post yesterday, a new Apple TV–and I mean truly new, with an App Store and games and everything–has been rumored for years and years now, and has never actually come to fruition. However, the leaks and info coming out over the past several months almost positively points to a new Apple TV being unveiled on September 9th, and this latest batch of news from TechCrunch is especially interesting from a gaming perspective.
So heres the deal. Apple’s existing Apple TV remote is nice and simple, but really too simple to perform any sort of complicated interactions. So for a long time now it’s been rumored that a new remote control would accompany this mythical revamped Apple TV. Various sources have pointed towards this new remote having a touchpad on top accompanied by at least two physical buttons and a microphone for interfacing with Siri. That all seems pretty reasonable and right in Apple’s wheelhouse. The TechCrunch article goes one step further though, and reports that the new remote will also include multi-axis motion control, that would make the remote akin to something like the Nintendo Wii remote.
Now, this is a very exciting prospect for sure. The Wii remote was nice and simple, similar to Apple’s existing Apple TV remote, but the ability to use it as a pointer made it one of the most natural ways to interface with your living room TV. Universal remotes have become increasingly cluttered and complex over the years, almost to the point of absurdity, so adding in tons more functionality by way of motion control to a new Apple TV remote makes a lot more sense than adding more buttons, just from a menu navigation perspective.
However, think about the opportunities for gaming. As TechCrunch’s Matthew Panzarino writes in the article, “A game controller with a microphone, physical buttons, a touchpad and motion sensitive controls would be extremely capable. While Apple is likely going to target the broad casual gaming market, I would not be shocked to see innovative gameplay blossom from that type of input possibility. Think, for instance, of multi-player gaming with several people using voice input, or many popular genres of party games that would do far better on the TV than on an iPad or iPhone."
Coupled with an App Store and a rumored A8 chip that would be plugged into a wall and could therefore be pushed to the ultimate max without worrying about battery life, and the rumored new Apple TV could turn out to be quite a little gaming machine for your living room. Panzarino rightly doesn’t see such a device eating into the hardcore market that Sony and Microsoft currently dominate, but it most definitely could eat into the more casual gaming audience like it already has with smartphones and tablets. It’s an exciting time if any of this comes to fruition, but it looks like we’ll have to wait until Apple’s September 9th media event to find out for sure.
[TechCrunch via MacRumors]
