Wii Have Some Very Cool Ideas
People are using the remote for Nintendo's Wii for everything but games.
May 2, 2007 — -- Aaron Rasmussen is precisely the kind of customer Nintendo would love to claim for its new game console, the Wii.
Young, bright and technically oriented, he's gone out and bought extra remote controls for the Wii -- invariably dubbed "Wii-motes."
The problem is that Rasmussen could care less about playing Nintendo's video games. He just wants the Wii-motes.
He and a business partner at USMechatronics, a firm in Garden Grove, Calif., design software for industrial robots. They found that if the wireless Wii-mote could control a tennis player on a TV screen, it could also make a robot arm swing a real tennis racket.
"I'd never even played a Nintendo Wii before," Rasmussen said, "because it was so hard to get."
The Wii has been a runaway success for Nintendo. The company has reported sales of more than 2.3 million consoles since the rollout in November. The unit sells for $250, if you can get your hands on one.
The wand-shaped Wii-motes, on the other hand, sell for $40.
The inconvenient truth for Nintendo is that on the inside, Wii-motes have a cool little part called an accelerometer. If you don't know what an accelerometer is, ask a 14-year-old. The accelerometer determines the position and movement of the remote as you play a game. If you play Wii tennis, for instance, the accelerometer will tell the console when you're making a backhand swing.
The Wii-mote transmits this information to the game console via Bluetooth, the same wireless technology that sends signals, say, between a hands-free headset and a cell phone. In other words, if the Wii-mote can be used for a game, it can be used with almost anything else rigged for Bluetooth signals.
Thus was born, in the labs of USMechatronics, the WiiBot, a factory-robot arm that would look unremarkable except that it was controlled by a Wii remote. Rasmussen and his friends set it up in their spare time. They usually work on robots that custom-shape granite countertops.
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