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Unintentionally or not, Nintendo has introduced not only a pretty fun and casual gaming system, but also a new area of commoditized development hardware.
While the intrepid among us have always been able (and willing) to build hardware to do many of the things the Wiimote does, it has always been 1) time consuming and 2) possibly costly and most importantly 3) inflexible. It is hard to build a good general purpose hardware interface, and often the tailored one makes more sense at the time.
Nintendo’s Wiimote introduces a powerful and useful hardware commodity. With the latest version of drivers for win/linux/osx (like DarwiinRemote) IR capability gives us most of the important capabilities for the wiimote on any computer with any kind of display that you can hook up to it. The kind of homebrew games, applications and demos that can be created (and the ease with which one can create them) almost staggers the mind.
Of course, its not without any work. The basic recipe looks something like this:
One Wiimote (Wii not required) + Interesting Idea + Two sets of IR LEDs strapped to batteries about eight inches apart = Fascinating tech demo or game.
That’s pretty much all you need. Of course, one must remember the warnings of the old Chinese man who sold you this system. This recipe with the Wii is strongly discouraged:
(grab the full desktop at the iconfactory)
So what could be done?
Cool pointing: Point to magnify, or spotlight, tear through layers of paint, detail etc..
Cool manipulation: Throw data around, fly through interfaces, vr lite.
We’ll find out pretty soon anyway.