From Batarang to Mjolnir: a look at the Nvidia Shield prototypes
The Shield handheld was a completely new thought from Nvidia. They took their brand new hardware platform and decided to do something unique with it, ending up with a not-quite-pocketable gadget capable of some serious gaming. You may wonder how it is that Nvidia came to the final design of the hardware currently on store shelves, and thanks to Nvidia we now know.
It started with a hand soldered design that was affectionately referred to as the Batarang, according to Nvidia’s Kevin Bruckert. A close examination of the board shows that this machine was indeed cobbled together by hand, with wires running along the top of the board and everything loosely in place.
“Believe it or not, I actually played a few games on this” Bruckert explained as he showed off the hardware. It even still bootedAndroid, though the battery wasn’t expected to last very long and the software was very far from the current official build. There was no touchscreen in this model, but the display had clearly already been shaped to match the design they were going for with the final product. The clever nickname comes from the shape of the main board itself, which does in fact resemble a batarang.
The next iteration of this design was a little more polished, but still very much in pieces. By the second stage of the hardware design, Nvidia had discovered a problem. Initially, the plan was to have the Tegra 4 rest on the underside of the main board, with all of the buttons and speakers occupying space up top.
It turns out this wasn’t a winning strategy, as some users would smash the buttons too hard and occasionally warp the main board in the process. The repeated flexing of the board would cause damage to the pins holding the Tegra 4 in place, which would cause the devices to fail after extended periods of heavy use. With that, the second batarang design was retired for a design that would allow the processor to live on the top side of the board.
The rest of project Mjolnir (Shield’s project codename) is public knowledge. The casing for the Shield unit that was designed and demonstrated at CES was determined to be awkward and uncomfortable for most users, causing one last design change that is now the final revision and consumer version of the gaming platform.
The reference device for this final design is a unique piece of hardware that is sprawled out on a metal rack that Nvidia calls the Spider. This unit has all of the same physical pieces as an off-the-shelf Shield unit, just stretched out for everyone to see.
It’s quite impressive to see the process Nvidia went through in designing their game system. They clearly had several goals in mind with the design, and it seems to have taken them very few iterations in order to reach their final goal.
The process from physical prototype to final design was likely many many steps, but the ability to test their hardware in such a disassembled state must have made it easier to figure out the best way to cram such a powerful device into the relatively small frame that is Shield.
