It’s CES 2023! And, we’re all looking at what some of the top tech companies are working on. If you saw CES 2022, then you would know about Dell’s Nyx concept. Now, the company is back in the spotlight with an update on it. Dell showed off the Nyx controller at CES.
What is the Nyx concept?
If you’re coming into this blind, then you’ll need a little bit of backstory. Back in 2022, Alienware showed an interesting concept during CES. It’s a gaming device that would allow you to stream games to different devices in your home. Sound familiar? Well yes, it sounds like cloud gaming, but there’s a twist.
Instead of your game being rendered in the cloud, it’d be rendered on a giant physical device in your house. So, you’d set up a home server that would stream the gameplay to your devices. This would eliminate the need for a strong internet connection and reduce the latency. With cloud gaming, your game is rendered and streamed from many miles away.
Not only could it play your favorite games, but it could also run two games simultaneously and stream them on the same device. Imagine playing both Elden Ring and Sonic Frontiers on your TV- don’t knock it until you try it.
Dell shows off the Nyx controller at CES
The concept is cool and all, but you can’t play any games without a controller. Well, at this CES event, Dell pulled the wraps off of the controller that will power your Nyx experience. The controller looks like a fancy PC controller adorned with the obligatory RGB accouterments. We see a colorful light strip on the south side of the controller with a colored Alienware logo on the top. The A, B, X, and Y buttons are also backlit.
As you look more at the controller, you’ll start to see subtle differences between this and your typical controller. For starters, the D-Pad has been replaced with a capacitive trackpad. That will take some getting used to for most players, as we’re all used to the feeling of a physical pad. However, the trackpad will pulse when you’re pressing in a certain direction. This might emulate the feeling of pressing a physical button.
Speaking of capacitive buttons, the shoulder buttons are also capacitive trackpads. The thing about them is that you can drag your fingers along them, and they will act like using the scrolling wheel on a mouse.
On the bottom, there are two buttons that seem like they can be mapped to perform certain actions. Back to the south side of the controller, there are two additional scrolling wheels that you can use to adjust settings for the controller. Other than those buttons, we have the two buttons that would act as the Start and Select buttons on the top along with two audio buttons.
Now, this is only a concept at this moment. So, there’s no guarantee that we’ll see this on store shelves at all. You’ll want to take this with a grain of salt.
If you’re looking for more Dell stuff at CES, check out this 6K IPS monitor.