Hmmm I agree that the next Wii will be much more powerfull and better motion technology, even baring in mind that it will be the cheapest on the market, they can still have lots of horsepower under the hood if they put a 500$ engine inside and sell it for 300$ or less.


I also think they should add the Wii Board 2 in it! Why not design the Wii console so that it can replace the Wii board! An internal Wii board, think about it! Remember the N64, it was so strong a car could drive over it and still work. So jumping on a console wouldn't hurt that much hehe.


Perhaps Nintendo comes up with something that is even more revolutionary... who knows. It's all too far ahead to make me feel excited, even SSBB is too far ahead for me already!!!

I am with Legend (did i just say that). It won't be as powerful as the current HD consoles, instead it will add an even more innovative control method. Not a giant leap like the Wii was/is, but add in a mic, analog triggers, maybe an I.R. camera on the nunchuck.

Wow, a lot of hilarious posts. Why should Nintendo be unable to cram some ridiculously expensive parts into their next console? They sure won't, but designing a video game console is no rocket science. It's a matter of choice, and the trick is keeping it affordable.

As for Wii 2:
- I expect them to expand upon the concept of immersion. Nintendo will keep the Wiimote, but they might add another method of interacting.
- I don't feel the Wiimote's accuracy is a problem, but whenever I played Wii over at a friends house, I noticed a slight lag - probably from the wireless connection, I don't know. They should minimize that.
- Tech specs will go up, that's a no brainer. Nintendo won't push the envelope, though. HD is for sure.

Can't developers use GC controllers and even the Classic controller for games? Dragon Ball Z used it, and SSBB will have 4 different controller setups (according to the SSBB website), so really developers already have the option to use different configs for games.

If devs don't want to use motion sensing, then i'm sure they don't have to. There is no point in releasing a 360-like controller as a standard. It's just a waste.

Also, technology advances fast people. By next gen i'd expect most consoles to be around the "Super PS3" power levels. There won't be a lot of difference between the graphics/power between systems. Wii 2 will have around PS3 graphics (at worst "Super 360" graphics) and have near perfect motion sensing controls.

Whatever happens, Next-Gen is going to be awesome...

Wii - Released 5 years after XBOX/PS2 - More powerful than XBOX/PS2
Wii2 - Released 5 years after 360/PS3 - More powerful than 360/PS3

The way technology works is, it always improves.

I agree with alot of people here: Wii2 will be an HD-system, more powerful than PS3, with even more innovations in game control. They won't include DVD/Blu-ray/whatever drive, because that drives up costs.

I have no idea what Nintendo is going to do with their eight generation console. At this point anything could happen. They could just keep everything and improve it, or they can come up with something completely new. If the Wii turns out to be very successful, they would probably just improve on the original. But if Sony and/or Microsoft use motion controls, Nintendo would want to create something new to keep people interested. So I think we still have to wait a little longer to see how this generation turns out.

Here is what I would like to see in the Wii 2.0 - due for release around Xmax 2010:

 - 2.0Ghz CPU
 - new "Raycasting" GPU tech (completely new gfx solution, non-poly based), running up to 720p. Supports native shadowing, lighting, complex models, etc... (***)
 - advanced Wiimote (includes camera slot, mic, etc..), better position detection
 - 256MB RAM
 - built-in "Millipede" storage (*)
 - cartridge slot (**)
 - form factor about 1/4th current Wii size

Launch price:  $199US (with game)

...

* - a Millipede drive will provide an immense amount of on-board storage (1TB up). No idea if the tech will be ready by 2010, and commercially available - but if so, it would be cool. If not possible, a fast USB/memory card slot allowing for large (expandable) quantities of on-board memory.

http://researchweb.watson.ibm.com/journal/rd/443/vettiger.html

** - no CD based drive. Removal of the drive will result in a much smaller/simpler unit, higher xfer rates, lower power consumption, improved reliability - and a much, much lower cost. By using a cartridge, they have direct access to all of the data on the card - giving it an effective memory space of gigabytes. By 2010, cheap cartridge media should reach the 10GB (or higher) range.

*** - love to see Ninty experiment with new gfx technologies. Even though resolutions have improved, image quality is not even close to 'TV' level. Whether some form of 'line-rendering, hardware raycasting' is feasible - I don't know. It may even be unnecessary, or dumb from a business point of view (make it hard for companies to port existing next-gen games to the platform).

...

I know one thing for sure. This "lag" business model is a great idea. When the Wii 2.0 comes out, there will be a compelling business reason for companies to port 360/PS3 titles to the new console (just the same way PS2 games are being ported to the Wii now).

I believe you mean raytracing not raycasting (ray casting is pre-scan line conversion and was used to produce 3D games like Doom) ...

You actually may be correct though:

"A working prototype of this hardware architecture has been developed based on FPGA technology. The ray tracing performance of the FPGA prototype running at 66 MHz is comparable to the OpenRT ray tracing performance of a Pentium 4 clocked at 2.6 GHz, despite the available memory bandwith to our RPU prototype is only about 350 MB/s. These numbers show the efficiency of the design, and one might estimate the performance degrees reachable with todays high end ASIC technology. High end graphics cards from NVIDIA provide 23 times more programmable floating point performance and 100 times more memory bandwidth as our prototype. The prototype can be parallelized to several FPGAs, each holding a copy of the scene. A setup with two FPGAs delivering twice the performance of a single FPGA is running in our lab. Scalability to up to 4 FPGA has been tested."

http://graphics.cs.uni-sb.de/~woop/rpu/rpu.html 

This was hardware that was built and tested in 2004 and compared directly to hardware of the day (the paper was published in 2005). The graphics they were capable of producing were approximately Playstation or N64 in terms of Geometry (much higher than that in terms of texturing) and they were far below cutting edge in terms of the manufacturing process; had they been using bleeding edge technology they could have produced PS2/Gamecube/XBox levels of geometry (with much better textures) and potentially some impressive texture effects. By 2011 or so (as graphics becomes far more about lighting and shading effects than geometry) the hardware raytracing could easily become far more impressive than conventional raster-scan conversion.

Moore's Law FTW.
Expect it to be 8-16 times more powerful than the wii for the same cost.
Although I don't think we'll see a Wii 2 until XMAS 2012 or 2013.
So maybe 32 times more powerful.
I think nintendo likes motion control, so some variation on that. I think in 2 generations... 2020ish, we'll see virtual reality, though, only if it's casual enough.