Ouya console is “around the size of a Rubik’s cube”

The Ouya console is already backed up by almost $5.5 million on Kickstarter but nobody’s actually ever seen the thing. Nobody outside the Ouya office, anyway, but according to hardware designer Yves Béhar, the console is much smaller than any other TV console on the market today.

“I don’t know what others are doing in the future, but we have made a deliberate attempt to go away from current shapes,” he revealed in a Q&A with readers over on Kotaku. “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.”

He also dropped some comments about the Ouya’s place in the console market, and how it compares – or doesn’t, for that matter.

“For the last few generations, consoles have largely been competing on hardware specs – faster speeds, better graphics. We wanted to disrupt this pattern,” he said. “We will see how the community responds, but we believe we can foster more creative games and bring some of that magic back to the gaming industry by being more open, giving more control and giving easier access to developers.”

Interestingly, Béhar confirmed that the controller features a touchpad to “enable many of the interactions we have become accustomed to on mobile”. So you know Angry Birds is probably going to be on there at some point.

The Ouya Kickstarter campaign has just over two weeks to go, with the console expected to ship next year.