How the Wiimote Works

The New York Times' 'How it Works' series touches on a remote with a twist: the Nintendo Wiimote. The article describes the micron-sized machines that make it work, displays cut-away graphics of the little white marvel, and rounds out the discussion with a breakdown of where the tech came from. From the article: "The controller's most-talked-about feature is the capacity to track its own relative motion. This enables players to do things like steer a car by twisting the remote in the air or moving a game character by tilting the remote down or up. 'This represents a fabulous example of the consumerization of MEMS,' the tiny devices known as micro-electro-mechanical systems, said Benedetto Vigna, general manager of the MEMS unit at STMicroelectronics, a leading maker of the accelerometers embedded in the controllers. (Nintendo itself declined to talk about the controllers' inner workings.) He said the motion sensors, using the technology that activates vehicle air bags, can accurately sense three axes of acceleration: up and down, left to right, and forward and backward."

Little low-tech for SlashDot, eh?

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

How the Wiimote Works

C'mon, "editors"...this is SlashDot, not Time. Most people here could probably have written that article blindfolded. How about a couple of real tech articles today?

Re:Analogies rule!!!

[eln]

Endlessly spinning in circles, never actually getting anywhere? Sounds like a pretty typical development environment to me.

Motion or angle?

[seebs]

I'm a bit confused. The ability of the Wiimote to sense the angle it's at seems quite consistent, and doesn't appear to be possible to "fool", while the ability to sense motion can be fooled somewhat.

It seems to me that they must be separate, at least a little. You can walk away with a Wiimote, far out of bluetooth range, turn it however you like, bring it back... And the console will still sense its orientation precisely. Location? Games that use that sometimes get out of sync so you have to wave the Wiimote around a bit to get them better calibrated.

So I'm pretty sure that's a separate feature, to say nothing of the additional component of the CCD pointing at the IR sources above your TV to give you a pointing device.

Not troll

[UbuntuDupe]

I'd M2 that unfair.

Time is very dumbed down, and uses slang my middle school English teacher wouldn't allow. That's for non-technical articles.

The NY Times article doesn't tell us anything we didn't already know.

Re:Not informative

[KDR_11k]

I assume the firmware is trying to keep it simple so people won't get confused by basic settings. A game that needs correct aim could always add those calibration options (of course it'd be better if the firmware could store that config so you don't have to redo it for every game, maybe once the lightgun games come out Nintendo will consider adding it to the firmware).