Introducing the Nex Motion Entertainment Hardware Reference Design
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Motion entertainment merges physical activity with compelling interactive content in an entirely new way. Over the last few years, Nex has pioneered developing accessible motion entertainment that reaches consumers on billions of camera-enabled devices including smartphones, tablets, Macs and PC.

Through the process we’ve also listened closely to our users. What we’ve learned is that many of them want to connect their smartphone or tablet to their TV in the living room. In fact, one of the most frequent requests from our global user community is “how do I get your motion games on my big screen TV”.

When we asked why they wanted to do that, what they said was that they believed motion entertainment really should be experienced on the larger screen to provide a more immersive experience, but also a shared experience together with family and friends in the living room.
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We couldn't agree more. The large-screen digital TVs that consumers have invested in really are the ideal canvas for motion entertainment to come to life.

But we also know that connecting your mobile device to a TV is not so easy, and a difficult process for our users. Finding the right cable, an adapter for your device, figuring what HDMI port to plug into, all of these are substantial friction points. Even more so, fiddling with this type of setup becomes a barrier for families and kids that have limited time and just want to start playing together.

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We believe a better solution is a TV set-top-box that enables all of the consumer's content needs end-to-end and includes motion entertainment all in one device. Cable operators and telecom providers are in a unique position to deliver this type of experience, integrating the full breadth of entertainment content for the consumer.

To help cable and telecom operators and smart TV OEMs bring motion entertainment to every household, Nex has created a turnkey Motion Entertainment Hardware Reference Design powered by technology from Arm.
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“Nex has been at the forefront of driving a new category of compelling home entertainment experiences enabled by Arm Total Compute Solutions which include premium Arm Cortex CPUs and Mali GPUs. New levels of creativity and innovation are now possible when we combine our technology with the Nex motion entertainment platform and content, and we look forward to the immersive, visual experiences made possible through this collaboration.”
—Pablo Fraile, Director, Home Segment, Arm

Our goal, in partnership with Arm, is to support OEMs and operators around the world in developing their own integrated set-top-box solutions for consumers and ensure it can run the latest motion entertainment from Nex.

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The Nex Motion Entertainment Reference Design includes the following:

• Camera and sensor specs that capture the optimal field of view for motion capture on a single camera and intelligently detects and sees all participants, enabling multiplayer experiences. In addition, these specs enable freedom of device placement and player positions across the living room.
  

• SoC architecture for ideal throughput of interactivity and graphics powered by the Arm Cortex series processors. GPU performance for on-device computer vision and machine learning that enables understanding of different types of body activities and pose detections. This allows us to reserve more GPU performance for console-quality graphics that are powered by our platform’s Unity integration, enabling more immersive and rich entertainment experiences.
  

• To enable the best console-like gaming experiences, we have also solved for optimal glass-to-glass latency. The responsiveness of a player’s motion and feeling of connection to the physical gameplay is paramount. Motion games are high action by default and serious action games demand ultra-low latency between the input and player feedback loop. Our system design optimizes and reduces much of the latency that can be introduced due to camera capture and ML processing.

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Performance baseline

In addition to specifying the hardware components that are essential to power motion entertainment in the living room, we’ve also established baseline performance requirement so that providers can help validate set-top-box hardware that is already in the market or early in development. These requirements give OEMs and operators a clear idea of what minimum performance will be required to adopt motion entertainment from Nex.
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How Nex is engaging the industry

Our first step is to demonstrate the Nex Motion Entertainment Hardware Reference Design (HRD) and show what type of motion content is possible for the entertainment industry. This is why Nex will be exhibiting and showing a prototype of the HRD at IBC in Amsterdam this September, Arm DevSummit in October, and Google TV Summit in November.

We are also partnering closely with operators, starting with Sky in the UK by integrating motion entertainment into their Sky Glass product line. And we are meeting with other operators around the world to enable their own consumer set-top-box experiences.

We’ve also partnered with SEI and Amlogic to create a turnkey set-top-box solution for operators that want to adopt an “off-the-shelf” motion-enabled STB powered by Android TV. This prototype is using Amlogic’s A311D2 logic board that we will be presenting together at IBC in Amsterdam. For more details from SEI read the press release here.

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Let’s get moving together

Nex is committed to enabling the entire TV and entertainment industry to realize the potential of motion entertainment, and to help people reconnect with the joy of movement. To learn more about the Nex platform and device ecosystem, please visit our website at https://platform.nex.inc. You can also connect with us directly here. Let’s connect and get humanity moving again together.

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