The New York Times ran an interesting piece talking about the growing usage of video games amongst older generations who’ve previously never had an interest. The enabling technology, of course, is motion control, that takes away the need to memorize arcane button pushes — and more importantly — the need to have the manual dexterity to actually perform these pushes.

The article focuses on the Wii and its use in retirement communities and even on cruise ships.

Read the full article here.He’s Just Not That Into You download

The Boston Globe has an interesting piece today (mainly focused on local component vendor ADI) on the rise of accelerometers and motion-sensing devices.  The article provides a good overview of some of the leading applications available today, including (of course) the Nintendo Wii, but also including Hillcrest Labs Nowhere to Run full ‘ Loop and a couple of mobile phone applications.

Read the article here.

The rumor mills are churning after Nintendo’s Takeshi Shimada spoke at last week’s Game Developers Conference. He discussed several potential enhancements to the Wii platform, including text-to-speech, new Mii channels and, most interestingly from our perspective, predictive motion sensing.

Shimada was quoted as saying that:

“Wii motion sensing could get an upgrade that learns from your movements and predicts your next action.”

Given discussions we’ve seen from developers (and some users) about the difficulties they have dealing with extraneous movements, a system that could “learn” a user’s patterns and intelligently translate them into intended movements (instead of just actual movements) makes a ton of sense.

Found here.

The Guardian reports that WiiCade , a Flash-based online gaming source for “homebrew” independently developed games has released an API for developers to create online flash games which can utilize the motion-sensing features of the Wii.

The article notes that this may indeed result in getting “100 versions of Tetris that let you manipulate shapes by twisting your wrist”, but regardless, it’s a great way to open the platform and the technology to folks beyond the small number of gaming software vendors developing for the platform.

Read the whole article here.

While motion control and sensing have made the Wii the popular favorite amongst current generations of gaming consoles, developers still have some doubts about the state of the technology.

In an interview in Computer and Video Games magazine, EA’s associate producer (for the new skateboarding game “Skate”) notes that motion control can be “messy” and that:

All of the sensors are active and all reporting information at the time, so we really have to find a way to filter what comes through on the motion controls so that everyone can have fun with them

He goes on to say that he’s still a believer in the value of motion control — but the task of designing around these extraneous inputs is relatively daunting for any developer.

Read the whole story here.

CORVALLIS, Ore., Feb. 28, 2007 — NaturalPoint Inc., will be exhibiting at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) from March 7-9 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. NaturalPoint’s cutting edge devices exemplify the “Take Control” theme of this year’s GDC, by evolving computer input beyond keyboard, mouse, and joystick. The TrackIR system turns any game player’s upper body into a precise controller with Six Degrees of Freedom (6DOF), while the upcoming OptiTrack camera and software toolset lets any animator set up a motion capture studio in a space as small as an office cubicle – for a fraction of the cost of currently available systems. Both of these product lines leverage NaturalPoint’s patented optical motion tracking technology to offer a level of affordable precision unmatched by any other company’s offerings.

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A new piece in IEEE Spectrum

profiles STMicroelectronic’s Benedetto Vigna, and the company’s move into accelerometers and motion sensing chips.

Interestingly, this strategy started off as a way of utilizing a soon-to-be obsolete chip manufacturing plant — the plant wasn’t going to be able to handle the next generation of microprocessors, but was adequate for the tolerances required by accelerometers.

There’s also some good future-looking tidbits in here, including some discussion of STM’s plans for MEMs-based gyroscopes and new applications for even smaller accelerometers (for example, embedded in shoes or textiles for medical monitoring).
Read the whole thing here.