Wii Have Some Very Cool Ideas

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."

It's What's Inside That Counts

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.

"We hooked it up with a broadsword," Rasmussen told ABC News. "It was just to have fun. We didn't hit anything with it."

A Big Hit

The WiiBot has become a darling of gadget-oriented blogs. Rasmussen posted a video on YouTube, and has had more than 600,000 hits so far.

And other people around the world are taking advantage of the versatility Nintendo unintentionally built into the Wii-mote.

There's an engineer in Los Angeles who uses it to run his TiVo and his remote-controlled vacuum cleaner.

There are said to be disc jockeys who (forgive the pun) jazz up the parties where they provide the music. (Why touch the mixing board when you can do it all with a Wii-mote three feet away?)

People report they're using Wii-motes with remote-controlled toy cars, or climate controls in their homes. There's even an Italian medical student, according to a Wii-hacker's blog, who goes over CT scans with the Wii wand.

Meanwhile, Back at Nintendo

All this puts Nintendo, which thought it was selling games, in an awkward position. It's already had some surprises with consumers who swung a little too hard and sent their Wii-motes flying across the room.

"We were surprised with the many different ways Wii has inspired people to create new uses for the Wii remote," said the company in a statement. "The Wii remote was created to play on the Wii system only and we don't encourage using it for any other purpose."

Rasmussen, the WiiBot inventor, says he doesn't have any grand plans that would further vex the company. The WiiBot, he says, "was just a weekend project, because we were working hard during the week."

"We would have done it without twist-ties if we'd really planned something."