wiimote

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BlueBeat first with legal Beatles downloads — or at least a hell of a lot of cheek. … Read more

The MotionPlus, a $20 accessory designed to improve motion detection for the Nintendo Wii remote control, will easily sell 10 million units after its market debut on June 8, an analyst contends.

Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter told Edge this week that the majority of those sales will occur when the accessory is bundled with Wii Sports Resort, EA Sports Grand Slam Tennis, and Tiger Woods PGA Tour '10 later this year.

He contends that 20 percent of U.S. and European Wii owners will buy those three titles, helping the Nintendo sell 8 million units of the Wii MotionPlus in just a few months. Pachter predicts another 2 million units will sell with new Wii consoles.

EEDAR analyst Jesse Divnich, also interviewed by Edge, isn't so quick to agree. He estimates that only 3 million units of the accessory will sell by the end of 2009 and that sales will reach 10 million units during Nintendo's next fiscal year, which starts in March 2010.

Although they don't agree on exactly when the 10 million mark will be reached, the analysts both predict that the accessory will be popular.

"I expect MotionPlus to be a sneaky success and ultimately attach to at least one third of the (Wii's) installed base," Pachter told Edge.

"Our forecast could be conservative," Divnich added. "Yearly sales could balloon much higher."

In addition to selling well, the MotionPlus is set to transform the Wii experience.… Read more

The days of losing weight with the Nintendo Wii are over. The culinary wizards over at DigitalChocolates are ushering in a new era of edible electronics, starting with a Wiimote made of pure white chocolate.

The candy bar looks to be an exact replica of a real Wii controller, but it's hard to tell if they carved out a choco-trigger on the bottom. I've never heard of the Merckens melting candy wafers that go into each bar, but apparently they taste like the "white from Hershey's cookies n' creme chocolate bars." Sounds good enough for me!

The Wiimotes are available on Etsy for $8 each. If you're not a Nintendo fan, DigitalChocolates sells a blue Sony PlayStation Controller made of chocolate as well.

More pics and a full ingredient list after the jump.… Read more

The TV remote control of the future isn't an expensive device with an LCD screen and blinking lights. It's your hand.

The classic TV remote control most of us have grown up with has been around in essentially the same incarnation for half a century. It's been tweaked over the years, but now one company is looking at ditching the remote altogether and using a camera mounted below a TV screen that senses hand motions instead of button pushes. The result is something that seems right out of Minority Report.

But the high-tech user interface Tom Cruise coolly manipulates onscreen isn't even all that far-fetched now, thanks to incremental improvements. Until now, the most innovative new input for entertainment in the living room has been the Wii-mote, the motion-sensing remote control/wand that has made Nintendo's game console a cultural phenomenon. Swing it like a tennis racket and you can pretend you're playing tennis, point it at the screen and use it like a mouse to navigate menus.

Televisions have progressed as well, with better picture quality and capability. Now TVs can record TV shows, stream Netflix movies, check the weather, read news headlines, and skim RSS feeds. The menus on those TVs appear more and more like what we see on our computer screens, so a new interface that operates more like a mouse seems almost inevitable.

… Read more

I know Wii remotes have already been used to control coil guns and extremely unsettling black widow spiders, but now you can actually have fun mowing the lawn.

A group of highly domesticated scientists at the University of Southern Denmark decided the world needed to be spared from the pain of shortening grass until the next unseasonal downpour. So they created a lawn mower controlled by a Wii remote.

They've called it Casmobot. And just when I thought this name might have an allusion to something vaguely Viking, I was disabused by the explanation that the "Casmo" part stands for Computer Assisted Slope Mowing.

The design is quite simple. The Wiimote is connected by a little Bluetooth to a computer and a bunch of robotics in the machine.

Depending on how much fun you want to have, you can either keep tilting your Wiimote to direct the mower or you can just guide it around the perimeter of an area and it will automatically cut all the grass inside.… Read more

LAS VEGAS--Imagine playing baseball on Nintendo's Wii Sports and being able to pull the ball to left field or lay down a bunt instead of just randomly smacking doubles or home runs.

A Silicon Valley company says its take on motion-control technology will offer far more accuracy to such games. CNET got the first look at the technology here at CES 2009.

Sixense Entertainment, based in Los Gatos, Calif., makes the technology called TrueMotion, which was first developed to track the head positioning of F-16 and F-18 jet pilots. It consists of a handset and a base station. The … Read more

Nintendo has just lifted the veil on a new accessory for the Nintendo Wii remote control. The Wii MotionPlus adapter will attach to the bottom of the Wii remote and give the player a more accurate sense of control by better measuring movements in a 3D space.

Sounds like this could be a blessing for those first-person-shooter games where the control may have been off a step or two. We'll have more on MotionPlus and when you can expect a review soon. Now, here's the press release:

Rory Reid from CNET.co.uk joins us to talk all things tech. iPhones won't help you get laid in the U.S. or the U.K., Speed Racer looks like an abomination and Randall's stuffy nose ruins the show.

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Microsoft may not be the only one looking to develop its own Wiimote-like game controller. Apple is researching a 3D remote of its own, according to AppleInsider.

The research, reportedly outlined in a November 2006 patent filing disclosed this week, describes a device that would work similarly to the Nintendo Wii controller "in video games to position a user's character or to otherwise track the movement of the remote control in a user's environment." The remote would apparently be designed to work with Apple TV as its console.

The device would also use some of the … Read more