06-01-2007, 06:42 AM
CNN Money takes apart the Wii-mote and gives us a look at the anatomy of our favorite game controller, and shows us the possibilities of things to come 
Very interesting info on. I don't think you'll be disappointed
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"Did you know that the Wii remote has an audio translator that can pick up analog audio signals (such as human speech) and translate it to a data signal that can be transferred to the Wii? What?"
*Very interesting info on. I don't think you'll be disappointed.
check it out here/source
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The only thing more fun than bowling in your living room with a bunch of friends is having their digital counterparts cheer you on from the alley inside your TV. The experience makes you forget about graphics altogether. You don't mind that your Mii is missing arms and legs.
And of course the Wii has that innovative interface, the Wii Remote. The Wiimote, as it has come to be known, features a speaker, a rumble pack that makes the device shake, and even a mystery feature or two that have yet to be exploited, like a microphone jack. (Wii Karaoke perhaps?)
But the Wiimote's magic really comes down to a $2.50 chip developed by a company in Cambridge, Mass., called Analog Devices Inc., (Charts) or ADI. Known as a three-axis accelerometer (see graphic), the chip precisely measures movement in three dimensions. At four square millimeters, several accelerometers would fit on your thumbnail.
Prying open a Wiimote, ADI applications engineer Harvey Weinberg explains how the innards work. "This is actually a pretty cool piece of engineering," he says. "There's a Bluetooth link in here, a little bitty speaker, and an infrared camera. Of course the most important part is the accelerometer." The camera communicates with the light bar, which sits above or below the TV set. This is important because of a player's tendency to swing the remote wildly while, say, trying to hit a baseball 450 feet. Each time the camera faces the TV, the machine reestablishes a player's whereabouts.
"The Nintendo guys were going to get large errors if they didn't figure out how to get absolute position," Weinberg says. "The camera resets the positional error. But they couldn't have gotten it to work with IR alone because most of the time you're not facing the TV. They couldn't have gotten it to work really good unless it was wireless. And they've aggressively chosen components that don't use a lot of power. The whole thing is synergistic."
Nintendo designed dozens of prototypes before settling on the Wiimote. Miyamoto says early versions looked more like a control pad. Some were whimsical, some complicated. Designers arrived at the current version by coming back to Iwata's decree to battle indifference, not the competition.
Miyamoto realized it wasn't a fear of gadgets that kept the average consumer from playing games. "TV remotes are always sitting out on a coffee table or on the sofa, but videogame controllers - people don't want them lying around," he says. "In that sense we thought we were losing to the TV remote. So we thought, What kind of controller can we create that won't make people afraid to touch it?"
article source
Very interesting info on. I don't think you'll be disappointed--------------------------------------
"Did you know that the Wii remote has an audio translator that can pick up analog audio signals (such as human speech) and translate it to a data signal that can be transferred to the Wii? What?"
*Very interesting info on. I don't think you'll be disappointed.
check it out here/source
--------------------------------------
The only thing more fun than bowling in your living room with a bunch of friends is having their digital counterparts cheer you on from the alley inside your TV. The experience makes you forget about graphics altogether. You don't mind that your Mii is missing arms and legs.
And of course the Wii has that innovative interface, the Wii Remote. The Wiimote, as it has come to be known, features a speaker, a rumble pack that makes the device shake, and even a mystery feature or two that have yet to be exploited, like a microphone jack. (Wii Karaoke perhaps?)
But the Wiimote's magic really comes down to a $2.50 chip developed by a company in Cambridge, Mass., called Analog Devices Inc., (Charts) or ADI. Known as a three-axis accelerometer (see graphic), the chip precisely measures movement in three dimensions. At four square millimeters, several accelerometers would fit on your thumbnail.
Prying open a Wiimote, ADI applications engineer Harvey Weinberg explains how the innards work. "This is actually a pretty cool piece of engineering," he says. "There's a Bluetooth link in here, a little bitty speaker, and an infrared camera. Of course the most important part is the accelerometer." The camera communicates with the light bar, which sits above or below the TV set. This is important because of a player's tendency to swing the remote wildly while, say, trying to hit a baseball 450 feet. Each time the camera faces the TV, the machine reestablishes a player's whereabouts.
"The Nintendo guys were going to get large errors if they didn't figure out how to get absolute position," Weinberg says. "The camera resets the positional error. But they couldn't have gotten it to work with IR alone because most of the time you're not facing the TV. They couldn't have gotten it to work really good unless it was wireless. And they've aggressively chosen components that don't use a lot of power. The whole thing is synergistic."
Nintendo designed dozens of prototypes before settling on the Wiimote. Miyamoto says early versions looked more like a control pad. Some were whimsical, some complicated. Designers arrived at the current version by coming back to Iwata's decree to battle indifference, not the competition.
Miyamoto realized it wasn't a fear of gadgets that kept the average consumer from playing games. "TV remotes are always sitting out on a coffee table or on the sofa, but videogame controllers - people don't want them lying around," he says. "In that sense we thought we were losing to the TV remote. So we thought, What kind of controller can we create that won't make people afraid to touch it?"
article source
