Three-Dimensional Input Devices

A REVOLUTIONARY DEVICE: THE NINTENDO WII REMOTE

In the past few years, no piece of hardware has changed the landscape of commercial video gaming as dramatically as the Nintendo Wii and its motion-sensitive controller, the Wii Remote (often shortened to Wiimote). It implements a number of significant innovations:

• A three-dimensional accelerometer reports how the player is moving the remote.

• An infrared transmitter positioned near the player's TV and an infrared camera in the Wii Remote allow a Wii game to compute the remote's position relative to the TV. Wii games know where the remote is in the room, and approximately where it is pointing.

As a pointing device, it is not as precise as a mouse, however.

• The remote contains a speaker, so it can make appropriate sounds (golf club, tennis racket, gun) right in the player's hand.

• The relatively small number of buttons on the Wii Remote (as compared to traditional controllers such as the PS3 SIXAXIS) makes the remote much less daunting to inex­perienced players.

• Because the remote uses Bluetooth wireless to communicate with the computer, play­ers can move around with it as much as they like (as long as they don't move too far from the Wii). This allows for much more active games than the traditional wired con­troller does.

• The Wii Remote contains a small amount of memory, which lets players store data (such as avatar attributes) in the remote itself. A player can use his Wii Remote on another player's Wii machine, and the data he stored will be available to the game.

The Wii Remote also includes several conventional controller features: a D-pad, a trigger, several buttons, and a vibration feature. The Nunchuck, an additional device for the play­er's other hand, provides another accelerometer, an analog joystick, and two more buttons. A new accessory for the Wii Remote, the Wii Motion Plus, adds an angular rate sensor to the basic remote. This device provides information about the way the remote turns as it moves and makes it more accurate.

No less important than the Wii Remote's innovations are the games that support it.

Nintendo deliberately made the Wii Sports games that ship with the Wii easy to learn and very forgiving. In the tennis game, for example, the player's avatar automatically runs to where the ball will land. All the player has to do is wave the controller to deliver a fore­hand or a backhand. The ease of playing these games has made them accessible to many people who would never have considered playing video games before. Wii consoles have been installed in nursing homes, because the motion-based interaction encourages elderly people to exercise. They're also being used as physical therapy for people recovering from injuries. Playing a Wii game is much more appealing than doing repetitive exercises.

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A REVOLUTIONARY DEVICE: THE NINTENDO WII REMOTE

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No less important than the Wii Remote's innovations are the games that support it. Nintendo deliberately made the Wii Sports games that ship with the Wii easy to learn and very forgiving. In the tennis game, for example, the player's avatar automatically runs to where the ball will land. All the player has to do is wave the controller to deliver a fore­hand or a backhand. The ease of playing these games has made them accessible to many people who would never have considered playing video games before. Wii consoles have been installed in nursing homes, because the motion-based interaction encourages elderly people to exercise. They're also being used as physical therapy for people recovering from injuries. Playing a Wii game is much more appealing than doing repetitive exercises.

The Wii Remote works very well in games that map a player's physical activity directly onto the avatar's activity in the game world, such as action, sports, and driving games. It is less successful with games that traditionally use a mouse, such as role-playing, strat­egy, and construction and management games. If you want your players to control your game with the Wii Remote (which works with PCs as well as the Wii itself), you should design the game for the Wii Remote from the beginning.