• Gadgets

    Wii've Lost Control

    By Abby Seiff Posted on 8.20.2008 8 Comments

    Ah the sweet smell of litigation in the afternoon. Nintendo, hardly a shrinking violet when it comes to courting lawsuits, is being sued Hillcrest Labs over the provenance of the Wii controller.

    8.27.2008 at 03:08pm - Comment by Kudoku

    Actually, kingofthepride, the Wiimote does contain accelerometers. The Infra-red capabilities are for pointing at the screen, not for motion sensing. The only way for the wiimote to sense motion with the infrared sensor would be if you constantly pointed the wiimote at the sensor bar, which would be quite inconvenient. If you cover up the infrared receiver on the wiimote with tin foil you will find that it is still possible to play any motion-intensive game such as Wii Sports, because the accelerometers inside are doing all the work. I would think Hillcrest would also sue Sony for using the accelerometers too. Also, the Power Glove did not use accelerometers. It used ultrasound to triangulate the position of the glove relative to the tv. Two ultrasound transmitters in the glove communicated with 2 sensors in an "L-bar" on top of the TV to locate the glove in 3D space, similar to how the modern Wiimote uses two infrared points on the sensor bar and a sensor on the Wiimote to sense where it is pointing and how far away from the TV it is. The finger bending was sensed with conductive ink. The ink had more resistance if it was bent, so the glove simply detected how much resistance was in the fingers to find the approximate position of them. For example, if the finger was fully bent, a large amount of resistance was detected. This resistance was detected by the glove and turned into a signal that was sent to the NES. If the finger was straight, no resistance was detected. So, the glove knew that the finger was straight and sent the appropriate signal to the NES.



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