(Credit:
Zoink Games)
Wiimote gone missing? You might want to check inside that orange and purple stuffed monster in your kid's room. If Bobby's been playing the interactive game WiiWaa, he had to shove the controller down the monster's throat. The player bounces and slingshots the little guy around as an onscreen version moves in kind across a colorful landscape of forests and bridges. It's a cute concept, but we feel kind of bad for the puppet who's forced to swallow a gadget and then get shaken into a stupor.
WiiWaa is a creation of Swedish game developer Zoink Games, though Zoink's currently sparse site doesn't post a release date--only a video of the stuffed animal getting repeated concussions.
(Via designboom)
(Credit:
505 Games)
Talk about shades of Cabbage Patch Kids. The rather unsettling Baby and Me Wii game brings baby to life in a child-rearing sim that not only ships with a Wiimote-ready doll, it's in a detestable color that a certain mouthless cat has made commonplace. But more disturbing is the prospect of this ending up as a replacement baby for some people.
Game-wise, this one utilizes motion control to prompt the doll to laugh, cry, or gurgle, though coming out of the Wiimote's teensy speakers, this can only project in an eerily disembodied way. There are eight game modes with Wii Balance Board support(!!), which further enables this little hellspawn mannequin to be burped, rocked, fed, and taught to walk.
Honestly, what will they think up next, breast pumps? This special edition has a November 10 release destined for the Australian market only.
(Source: Crave Asia via Aussie-Nintendo)
Wii MotionPlus will likely make the Wiimote much better.
(Credit: Nintendo)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 moreDon Reisinger is a technology columnist who has written about everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Don is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and posts at The Digital Home. He is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
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
Ceatec attendees try out motion-controlled TV in September 2008.
(Credit: Erica Ogg/CNET)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
TrueMotion remote is set to ship in December.
(Credit: Erica Ogg/CNET)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 controller tracks movement along six different axes, and the base station generates a very weak magnetic field. The data is used to determine the exact position of the cursor on the screen.
Nintendo's Wiimote, by contrast, uses three axes and measures the acceleration of the handset, not the absolute position of the remote. Using the absolute position allows people playing motion-control games, such as baseball, bowling, or soccer, to "use real world skills," said Sixense CTO and Chief Architect Jeff Bellinghausen. As in, if you know how to play baseball, TrueMotion lets you make strategic plays, like hitting a bloop single to left or a double to right.
But TrueMotion also makes a difference in how games are developed, according to Sixense CEO Amir Rubin. TrueMotion measures the exact degree of position of the remote every 10 milliseconds. When developers know the exact position of the cursor, there's less need to develop complex algorithms for games just to compensate for not knowing where the cursor is.
The first incarnation will be available in December for PC gaming. It will be backward compatible with a number of popular gaming titles, such as Crysis, Call of Duty 4, and the Madden and NBA Live series.
Big game makers have already had the TrueMotion development kit for a year. By the time the PC gaming version is released, they will have had two years to play around with it.
And although it's not announcing anything yet, Sixense says it is in talks with all three console makers--Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo--about licensing its technology. TrueMotion for console games won't be available until 2010 at the earliest.
Here's a video I took of Bellinghausen, demonstrating how TrueMotion technology works.
(Credit:
Nintendo)
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:
Nintendo introduces the Wii MotionPlus
July 14, 2008
Nintendo's upcoming Wii MotionPlus accessory for the revolutionary Wii Remote controller again redefines game control, by more quickly and accurately reflecting motions in a 3D space. The Wii MotionPlus accessory attaches to the end of the Wii Remote and, combined with the accelerometer and the sensor bar, allows for more comprehensive tracking of a player's arm position and orientation, providing players with an unmatched level of precision and immersion. Every slight movement players make with their wrist or arm is rendered identically in real time on the screen, providing a true 1:1 response in their game play. The Wii MotionPlus accessory reconfirms Nintendo's commitment to making games intuitive and accessible for everyone. Nintendo will reveal more details about the Wii MotionPlus accessory and other topics Tuesday morning at its E3 media briefing.
Source: Kotaku
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 Apple TV and its current remote control.
(Credit: Apple)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 multitouch features seen on other Apple products, including the iPhone and MacBooks. According to the filing, it would "zoom into and out of an image or a portion thereof based on the absolute position of the remote control."
Patent filings are never any guarantee of actual products, of course. But there will be particular interest in this one because a move by Apple into the game industry has been rumored--and hoped for, by loyalists--for years. So if nothing else, it will keep that flame alive at least a little while longer.
Microsoft is reportedly working on its own version of Nintendo's Wiimote and plans to introduce it by the end of the year. The report comes from MTV News, which attributes the information to a developer "who has been brief on the project" but sought anonymity to preserve business relationships.
The source told MTV News that the project, supposedly in development since last August, is being designed by Rare, the U.K.-based game studio acquired by the software giant in 2002. Microsoft would not comment on the report.
Although its functions are similar to those of the Wiimote, according to the report, the device does not need a companion controller to be used with it. The device has "face buttons, an analog stick, and microphone," MTV News said. A purported sketch of a working prototype of the device can be seen here.
