CES 2023: How Dell’s Concept Nyx is reimagining collaboration & gaming

How will we connect with colleagues in five to ten years’ time? Will we all be interacting with holograms? Fully immersed in virtual worlds? Or will the reality be much closer to how most of us work from our laptops today? Dell’s Concept Nyx seeks to address these issues…

Table of Contents

• Intelligent, familiar tools for future interactions
• Advancing the Concept Nyx ecosystem 
• Gaming: New Concept Nyx controller concept and game-changing enhancements
• One controller to rule them all…
• No more tug of war
• All play and no work? AI solutions for hybrid life
• So what’s next for Concept Nyx?

Virtual worlds and immersive experiences could offer exciting new ways to connect with others – and our content. And with people more dispersed and working patterns more personalized than before, how we collaborate and get things done have never been more important.

It’s my team’s role to dig into future trends and technologies, experiment with solutions and reimagine experiences. Though immersive environments will play a role in the future of work, face-to-face meetings, instant messages, collaboration tools, and video calls aren’t going anywhere. That’s why we’re focusing on the user experience and honing in on everyday micro moments that could be disruptive as we potentially bounce between physical, digital and virtual worlds in the future.

We’re asking questions like: How will people interact at the intersections of these worlds? What tools will people need to move between these locations seamlessly? What if people don’t want to wear a headset and dive into a virtual world for eight hours each day – would they be excluded from future projects or collaboration opportunities?

Intelligent, familiar tools for future interactions

Using Concept Nyx’s ability to deliver compute all around, powered at the edge, we have been exploring how to pair familiar devices and peripherals with Artificial Intelligence (AI) to work together as an ecosystem to deliver easily accessible and immersive experiences beyond gaming.

Our labs are packed with curated immersive demonstrations and concepts to help us test and explore how Dell could help people move between various spaces and tasks intuitively in the future. From fully immersive Virtual Reality (VR) builds to Mixed Reality (XR) experiences featuring displays and other tools that remove the need for a VR headset, these environments have helped us evolve concepts like the Concept Nyx Companion.

As a lightweight tablet-style device that could be viewed and accessed in VR and XR environments, the concept could be a consistent tool throughout all these spaces and could ensure users’ content is in one place as they move between spaces and tasks. No more taking photos of whiteboards or copying notes to be uploaded to a different space – users could just simply screenshot their project space and/or easily copy content for sharing across screens.

Together with the Concept Nyx Stylus, users could input notes by voice or via pen, and then drag and drop them into digital and virtual collaboration spaces, and even use the voice activation for AI image creation – perfect for non-aspiring artists! All these tools could also seamlessly be used alongside the Concept Nyx Spatial Input in a future desktop environment with a keyboard and mouse, and possibly 3D displays too.

We’ve been looking at creative ways to connect these traditional tools for a clutter-free space, and we’ve also been thinking about intuitive gestures for interacting with content – for example, using the tip of the Stylus for writing and the top of the Stylus for interacting with onscreen content or using the Spatial Input as a dial for a 360 view or for zooming in on details.

We’ve also been thinking through how people might show up in future digital and virtual spaces. We’ve all been on video calls where we need to step away for a moment to answer the door or tend to a pet or child off camera. Instead of leaving a blank screen, empty seat, or static 2015 headshot, imagine with a wave of your hand, you could stay present as an intelligent avatar while you step away or stay off camera completely.

To explore this, we’ve been experimenting with gestures and movement tracking and building on our imaging technology and video conferencing expertise to create the Concept Nyx Spatial camera, which when paired with AI software, could learn a user’s expressions and mannerisms to deliver a more authentic representation of them for future interactions.

Advancing the Concept Nyx ecosystem 

From infrastructure to devices, Dell is at the center of present and future workplaces and is focused on developing the tools that will be needed to navigate these spaces. Right now, this means bringing tools to market like a new generation of UltraSharp conferencing monitors and intelligent webcams with motion activated controls and presence detection, and building on technologies like storage, 5G, multicloud and edge that provide the advanced connectivity and infrastructure to allow organizations to shape how they work.

In the future, productivity tools will be connected and intelligent enough to seamlessly move from experience to experience and task to task, helping to break down barriers and redefine how colleagues connect with one another.

My team continues to explore the future of compelling, immersive experiences in both work and play. Concepts play a huge role in allowing our designers, engineers, and strategists to test and tweak devices and solutions to inform future experience roadmaps.

Gaming: New Concept Nyx controller concept and game-changing enhancements

Have you ever wanted to watch a movie but your partner, family member or housemate wants to keep dropping into new rounds of Fortnite? We’ve all been there. As the living room, and specifically the screen in it, became the place where families connected, it also emerged as the battleground for epic tug of wars between, ‘My show’s on’ and plenty more of ‘Just one more game.’

Last year, a dedicated team of conjurers in our Experience Innovation studios broke the mold of the PC gaming experience by introducing Concept Nyx – an edge gaming concept that provides easy access to gaming libraries across multiple devices and screens so players can take their gaming session around the home effortlessly. Well, this year, the team has taken their experimentation even further to explore how to make your gaming libraries more accessible than ever.

But how?

One controller to rule them all…

The keyboard and mouse have long sat at the heart of PC gaming – playing an integral role in real-time strategy or MMO (massively multiplayer online) games. Next, console-like controllers crept up next to PCs, offering simplicity and couch-friendly design but leaving much to be desired. There had to be a better, reimagined controller designed around the modern gamer and their needs.

This is where our “mad scientists” dug in.

We won’t lie, the first designs were pretty wild: we added straps, a ton of buttons, sensors and even created a modular design that could be taken apart and customized for each game. These were all cool and radical, but we started to wonder: What if your controller recognized you from others in your home so when you picked it up, you were launched right back into where you left off? What if your controller automatically optimized itself depending on what type of game you were playing?

Introducing the Concept Nyx Game Controller.

Now, before you ask, this is a concept, not a product. It’s one way for us to test out technologies to help inform our future experience roadmaps. We’re proud of how many of our dream features we managed to squeeze into this prototype.

At first glance, it might look like just another controller, but take a closer look and you’ll find many unique features we’ve never seen on a PC gaming controller before.

Personalized settings and content could truly be at your fingertips. A clever fingerprint reader could get you into Guild Wars 2 in an instant and you could stream to any of your devices or screens by pointing the controller at them and pulling the trigger. Don’t want to go through the motions? You could even use your voice to connect.

When it comes to immersive gameplay, we’re experimenting with haptics and self-adjusting variable resistance thumb sticks (we know that’s a mouthful) that can be tailored to your preferences or the specific game you’re in. So, whether you’re driving a tank, using a bow to hunt, or taking down robots, the thumb sticks and our X-triggers could give you rich sensory feedback.

We’ve also embedded PC gaming musts into this concept by including shift buttons to allow for more front button options, innovative scroll wheels for easy navigation and weapon cycling, plus an intelligent touchpad for instant access to customizable controls – all of which would make it easier to stay out of the settings menu and stay in the game. Imagine being able to easily switch between weapons, armor, potions, and other inventory items with a quick flick down on the scroll wheels

Because we know it’s sometimes tough to keep up with the different gaming controls across different games, we’ve also paired the controller with fully customizable intelligent on-screen controls and overlays to show the button mapping. With this feature, you’d never have to guess if you mapped the X-button to your shields or your grenades.

No more tug of war

Remember that fight between the gamer and show binger? The white flag might be flown in the future, because the built-in Wi-Fi connection directly to Concept Nyx means you and others in your household could easily multitask and view messaging apps, emails, movies or games on intuitive split-screens. What’s even better – connect one (or a couple of) wireless headsets, and you could game on half of your screen while your loved ones watch a movie on the other half! Yup, it’s that simple. Everyone is happy!

We’ve also improved and simplified the Concept Nyx dashboard so that you could easily see what your friends are playing and access your games quickly. We’re experimenting with new shared experiences which could bring families and friends closer together, giving people the flexibility to game with and around others in the same room. For families, we want future gaming experiences to be shared and celebrated between parents and the next generation of gamers. To help with this, we’ve developed some innovative parental tools and dashboards that would allow parents to observe, participate and interact with their children.

All play and no work? AI solutions for hybrid life

And finally, ever feel you need to be in two places at once? We’ve all had those experiences where you’re multitasking, perhaps getting work done with one eye on a game or watching a movie, and then your phone rings. Well, we’re experimenting with ways to help users find some balance: What if, in addition to the split screen capabilities, you could activate an Artificial Intelligence (AI) assistant to listen in for your name or pick up on when someone asks you a question so that you don’t miss anything important? And, what if we also added captions to the call so you could skim for extra context when called up to respond? A multitasker’s dream, perhaps?

It may sound like one of our most audacious explorations to date, but the integration of work and play is real, so we’re going to continue exploring ways AI could help us seamlessly transition between tasks and spaces.

So what’s next for Concept Nyx?

Gaming leads the way for immersive experiences and these explorations have been the blueprint for the development of Concept Nyx’s intelligent edge ecosystem beyond gaming. As gamers ourselves, we’re stoked to push the boundaries of intuitive gaming experiences and hope to bring the learnings from this journey to our future portfolios. Watch this space for further updates!

Last Updated on 25 May 2023 by Glen Robson