Ouya Console Roughly the Size of Rubik's Cube, Designer Says

Ouya (pronounced ooh-yah) is one of the more fascinating projects to hit Kickstarter. What started off as a plea to raise $950,000 for an open-source Android console has now brought in nearly $5.5 million in pledges, with a little over two weeks still to go. Clearly there's a ton of excitement surrounding the project, as well as skepticism from those who believe Ouya has exactly a zero percent chance of launching, which means over 40,000 backers would have flushed millions of dollars down the drain.

It's too early to tell what will become of Ouya, but in the meantime, Fuseproject's Yves Béhar took some time out of his schedule to answer user generated questions. If his name looks familiar, it's because he designed the One Laptop for Child device, and now he's tasked with building the $99 Ouya console.

Ouya Game Controller

"I don't know what others are doing in the future, but we have made a deliberate attempt to go away from current shapes...our console is quite small, around the size of a Rubik's cube, and so it will easily fit anywhere in a room, or be easy to throw in a backpack," Béhar explained.

Béhar touched on a variety of design topics, including the possibility that Start and Select buttons could end up on the controller, even though prototype renders omitted these features. He also talked about the importance of airflow and giving the Tegra 3 chipset room to breathe, thought didn't get into specifics.

It still remains to be seen if Ouya will actually materialize, and if it does, how it will be received. At the same time, it's a good sign that Ouya is bringing in some experienced talent to get this project going. In addition to Béhar, Ouya announced in a recent update that Muffi Ghadiali from Amazon's Lab126 is part of the team. Ghadiali worked on the Kindle line of products at Amazon.