TL;DR
- The Figment is a gaming handheld prototype with a 7.5-inch E-Ink display.
- It’s just a concept for now, with a body made from 3D-printed and laser-cut parts.
- It plays choose-your-own-adventure-style games that use AI to fill in the gaps.
AMOLED displays are all the rage on the latest Android retro gaming handhelds, but a new design uses something far more efficient: E-Ink. The Figment is a new conceptual design that combines a Nintendo Switch-like form factor with an E-Reader display to create the perfect device for choose-your-own-adventure-style games.
Coming from the mind of tinkerer Pedro Porras Luraschi, it features a 7.5-inch E-Ink display, with four buttons serving as a D-pad and three face buttons on the other side. The body is a combination of 3D-printed and laser-cut parts, and an ESP32 microcontroller powers the whole thing.
It won’t run any modern emulators, instead using a mix of pre-written adventure stories and AI to create text-based gameplay. The game engine uses AI to generate images to match the stories and text for paths not written by the original author. The low-power chip can’t run an LLM on-device, so it requires an internet connection to work. The developer plans to save generated content onto the device for offline play in a future update.
For now, the Figment is merely a proof of concept, but the developer may open-source the hardware and game engine if it gains steam. To learn more and get the latest updates, sign up for the newsletter on the official website.
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