By looking at patents filed with Nintendo, we can speculate that the new Joy-Con controllers for Nintendo's Switch 2 might be equipped with a technology that reads the player's mind and knows their next move. The announcement of a new innovative system compatibility for the Switch 2 with a tracking device that also takes into account the movements of the player's hand and fingers came with the release of a newly published patent application from Nintendo talking about the technology that may be built into the new console.
Nintendo Switch was released more than a decade ago and gained quite a bit of popularity. This hybrid game console of Nintendo's that can also be used as a portable device is the most popular latest console. In fact, it is the Switch that has significantly contributed to Nintendo breaking the record for the most US sales with over 100 million units. We are now getting very close to the end of the era of Switch, which still remains to be the most beloved console of a generation. Nintendo is now ready to give way to a new product line, to be called the Nintendo Switch 2. The company announced the Switch 2 a few days ago through a short video. Yet there are a lot of inquiries in the sector, like the potential of the new console, some information on which may come out at the Nintendo Direct program that will be on April 2.
One of the questions is likely to be the physical controllers of the console, which may be the source of the new Joy-Con feature still to be disclosed. A new system that will maintain two movable main units virtually as one unit will feature a magnetic attachment that can exist between Joy-Con. Another feature may be the capability to analyze player inputs and provide feedback before such activity happens. A patent application that was submitted by the creators of LEGO in August 2017 and which went public on January 23 portrays a processing system employing an array of indicators that function as "modes" to trigger a sequence of events.
Based on the description of the patent, which is the design flow chart of the logic of the machine, Nintendo talks about a system that will sense a finger of a player until it gets in contact with the buttons. As to the player's finger, when it moves from one button to the next in sequence, the system can then do the inputs automatically based on the order of the buttons the player has contacted or pressed. In other words, the system as described can keep track of the players' finger movement on the controller and execute actions based on predicting their next move. This would be really helpful, meaning only things like better menu navigation or attack sequences in a game could be predicted. The predictive system has been widely used in games for several years. Attempts to create a game-like logic system that "guesses" the input of a player, e.g., rollback netcode for fighting games, have been conducted for a long time as well.
It has to be stressed, though, that the patent application is a mere attempt to register a patent theory or model and is not the same as a technology that has been developed or even set up or in any way has been integrated with original or primary hardware. Two things can be said with certainty: the first one is that, without confirmation from Nintendo, no one can affirm that the patented system is the Switch 2, the first one, or any other hardware Nintendo has built already. Second, patent applications do give us hints as to what the engineers and designers of Nintendo are excited about or at least what they are brainstorming about. An example might be how the new "Nintendo Fax System" might work in a future version of Animal Crossing. Nevertheless, most of the time the fitted models might not get to the real products.