Elastic circuits that stretch to more than twice their lengths could lead to new devices that can bend with a person’s body — inside and out.
Discovery Channel :: News – Technology :: Stretchy Circuits Extend Like Serpents
Archive for Wii
Snake-like Circuits
Wii Workout: Buy or DIY?
There’s lots of buzz around the new Wii Balance Board:
The hit combination of Wii Sports™ and the Wii Remote™ brought golf swings and tennis serves into people’s homes. Now Nintendo turns the living room into a fitness center for the whole family with Wii Fit and the Wii Balance Board.
WiiFit was shown by Nintendo at their E3 press conference today. The game uses a new, bundled peripheral called the “Wii Balance Board” that is essentially a pressure sensitive platform. You stand on the platform, and the pad can detect not only where both your feet are, but how much pressure you are applying with both feet on every point of board.
Because pressure can be detected, the WiiFit game can calculate your exact balance point (whether your weight is shifted left, right, or even slightly left and forward, or far back and to the right). Using this function, the game displays the data on screen to tell you if you are physically doing the exercises shown on screen correctly.
There are more Balance Board pics at Engadget and Gizmodo, but be sure to check out this video showing how to make your own:
via Instructables and i-Cubex.
Wii Drum
… this video shows the just released Flash PaperVision 3D engine(beta) integrated with Wii remotes using WiiFlash playing Roland V-Drums – details and code at RockOnFlash …
Slowly But Surely …
There’s evidence that the TVIR meme is replicating. Although people are still asking whether the virtual is real, the answers are inching closer to the right conclusion. The Read/Write Web covered a panel at the recent Supernova conference entitled Virtual Life or Virtual Hype?
The brief description in the program was:
“Do most people really want to immersed in 3D virtual worlds? And what are the real business benefits of these massively multiplayer environments? This session will examine which activities will migrate to virtual environments and when physical forms will continue to dominate.”
…
The panel all agreed that looking at Korea as an example, as the ‘young generation’ grows up and infrastructure is built out, there should be just as vibrant a market in the US. In other words, the panel all seemed to agree that it was not hype.
There are many reasons why 3D is a good means of dealing with information. The first and really most compelling is that our senses are a very advanced 3D virtual world rendering system. We’ve all been working in 3D since we were born – it’s impossible not to since the world we live in is 3D. Galaxies and atoms cluster in 3D. The Myoglobin protein that makes meat red has as all proteins do, a 3D structure:
Some programmers prefer abstractions and they along with many writers will lament the end of the text dominated web. However, the iPhone, Wii and other touch interfaces coupled with multimedia will eventually be the norm. These approaches mesh well with how our natural, biological virtual world processing system enable our minds to interface with the so-called “real” world. If you’re having trouble dealing with this, here’s an updated, more potent cure for VR Syndrome(the chronic inability to accept that reality is a virtual world):
- say “the virtual is real“
- repeat this phrase as frequently as possible
- then as it gets easier to deal with, say it once a day or as needed.
- Read Touching The Meshverse
- Subscribe to the TVIR category of the MJ
- Go to your nearest neighbor or electronics store and play with the Wii
-
WiiPhone
This past weekend I played with a Wii and while making my Mii avatar, I was struck by how similar the process is to creating an avatar in Second Life. It was also obvious that this kind of interface could work for lots of things if it had softer iPhone like controls. There’s similarlity in how both work and why people like them:
Once you use an iPhone, you’ll get twitchy fingers. You’ll wonder why you can’t swipe your finger across your laptop screen to jump backward and forward in your browser. The touchability exposes the mouse as the crude finger substitute that it really is. Look at the success of Nintendo’s Wii, which works on the same principle, converting physical movements into virtual ones. People are ready to break the fourth wall of computing and put their fingers directly on the data. This is manual-free computing, instinctive and intuitive, with zero learning curve.
I’ve mentioned before that people are hacking the Wii, so once the iPhone comes out I don’t suppose it will be long before we see an iPhone and Wii remote meshed together. I believe that this is the kind of interface that will be pervasive in the meshverse. It’s the kind of platform I’ve been creating software for over the past 5 or 6 years so it is pretty exciting to see it materializing.
Virtual Sports, Real Injury
CNN, via Reuters reports that Dr. Julio Bonis diagnosed himself with Wiiitis, a kind of “tennis elbow” developed after many hours of playing simulated tennis on the Nintendo Wii system.
With virtual golf, boxing, baseball and bowling already on the market, “future games could involve different and unexpected groups of muscles,” Bonis said. “Physicians should be aware that there may be multiple, possibly puzzling presentations of Wiiitis.”
Wii Touches The Meshverse
Since writing Touching The Meshverse, I’ve found out about people hacking the Nintendo Wii controller for use with Second Life via The Click Heard Round The World. If you’re a hardware type, a good tech resource for this kind of thing can be found at wwward.expressions and see also How To Make A Wii Sensor Bar
3D And Beyond
It’s one thing when computer industry people are promoting 3D, quite another when Academy Award winning film producers weigh in. Discussing his upcoming Avatar movie with Business Week, producer James Cameron talks about the future of 3D and beyond:
Here’s what can happen, although it’s too early to say if it will: 3D can become ubiquitous as digital cinema replaces film. As digital cinema rolls out, stereo follows—and in some cases leads the charge, as we have seen recently with the digital 3D releases of Chicken Little and Monster House forcing the installation of hundreds of new digital projectors.
There will eventually be major titles available from all studios at some screens in almost all multiplex cinemas worldwide. I would say the horizon for this is five years. 3D can become a fully accepted way in which audiences view movies. It will become another consumer choice, like premium or regular gas. The premium experience of 3D will be the preferred viewing experience for action, animated, fantasy, and science-fiction films.
3D’s broad acceptance at theaters will generate enough content that consumer-electronics manufacturers will make home players and monitors available. The technology exists now, but is not readily available as off-the-shelf products. 3D display will become a must for video and computer games.
In 20 years, stereo media may become the preferred method for displaying all information, including news and other broadcast media. The density of information one can place on a small screen becomes much higher if it’s stacked in three dimensions.
BW: Is there something beyond 3D in film? Could we ever see in cinema the same kind of physical participation we’re starting to see in video-game consoles like Nintendo’s Wii?
Imagine a movie in which the viewer is swept along by a narrative, following the action from place to place, but without the intervention of a camera. You can choose which character to watch in a scene, as if you’re an invisible witness standing there while a real event plays out. This is still years away, at a level of realism people would consider cinematic, but certainly not decades away.
I can imagine the dense fantasy worlds I like to create for movies having an equal or greater life in a world of interactive play, authored by others, in a partnership. Of course, add massive multiplayer capability to this, and people will never leave their homes.
If you or your clients are still wondering if 3D will have a mainstream impact, this is a notable input from a very influential media producer.
Related MJ Links
All the News That’s Real?
Rabid video gamers could get some help keeping in touch with the outside world this weekend as Nintendo Co. launches an online news service through its popular Wii console. … “It kind of makes sense for other types of content to be made available on the Wii.”CNN Technology
One wonders how long it will be before live news feeds will be incorporated into gameplay so virtual characters will provide human players with news they can take action on. Reuters already has a full-time reporter in Second Life reporting on current events but that is outside the flow of a game’s storyline. Once connected to gameplay, virtual news will provide an opportunity for people to explore the impact of different choices. What are the ramifications for business, education, law and politics? The potential for learning seems very significant but there are pros and cons as with most things. How will game players distinguish between actual and fictional news? This could be problematic in both the game world and the world of flesh but I think as long as we don’t ignore the potential downsides, the positives will far outweight them.
