Nintendo's got game
By Dean Takahashi, Contributing Writer -- EDN, August 1, 2006
Behind every cool innovation rests another. That's the case with Nintendo's clever game controller for its upcoming Wii video game console.
The controller has received kudos for its intuitive feel and has helped turn around perceptions about Nintendo's competitiveness with Sony and Microsoft in the video game business. At the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles, gamers waited for three hours just to test drive the controller, but few of them understood how the Wii controller works.
With the Wii controller, the gamer doesn't mash buttons or flick joysticks. Rather, the player points the controller at the screen or swings it to make something happen in the game. Acting as an extension of the arm, it resembles a TV remote control. Shigeru Miyamoto, Nintendo's top game developer, said the aim of the controller is to make games more inviting to non-gamers or those who are intimidated by hard-core games.
"It's important to make people feel comfortable with games," Miyamoto says. "It's light, and if you leave it on the coffee table, it doesn't look out of place. That's because it looks just like a TV remote."
In planning the controller over the past several years, Miyamoto said the company worked hard to make sure that the technology behind the controller could live up to the ambitions that the designers had for it.
One of the key technologies behind it is a micromachined accelerometer, or microelectromechanical system (MEMS). This sensor, a chip that is really a miniature mechanical device etched in silicon, measures both acceleration and 360 degrees of motion. By measuring changes in the electrons that surround a piece of metal, the accelerometer actually determines where the metal has moved relative to its starting position. The technology has been around for many years and is used by the millions in devices such as car air bags and sensors that lock down hard disk drives and protect them from damage when gadgets such as laptop computers or Apple iPods are shaken or dropped.
Nintendo had tried out these technologies in some of its handheld games. But when the Japanese company decided to include motion-sensing in its game console controller, both STMicroelectronics and Analog Devices stepped up to provide the accelerometers. Benedetto Vigna, director of the MEMS business unit at STMicroelectronics, says his company started developing MEMS accelerometers in 1999. The chips were relatively costly and slow, but over time the company drove the cost down to less than $3 each and enabled three-dimensional sensing.
"They had worked a while on this application," says Vigna. "What they were missing was a big supplier to give them the right price and technology. We had to make a quantum leap to move from high-end technology to the consumer market."
Nintendo signed up STMicroelec-tronics, but also uses Analog Devices as a second source. Rich Mannherz, customer product manager at Analog Devices, says the accelerometer is so sensitive that it can sense changes in thousandths of a "G," or the unit of measure for the force of earth's gravity. As a comparison, swinging a tennis racket generates an estimated five Gs of motion.
Both companies process the data from the accelerometer using supporting signal processing chips. A Bluetooth radio from Broadcom then sends the data in real time into the game console. The radio operates with low latency so that the data can move from the controller to the console in a handful of milliseconds, says Scott Vivaud, vice president of Broadcom's wireless business division. That's faster than the typical 150-millisecond response time for most human actions.
Lastly, the Wii remote uses optical sensors to determine where the player is in relation to the box and to determine where exactly on the screen the player is pointing the controller. It's through this combination of technologies that "tilt" is now something that game makers encourage from players.
"The technologies are inexpensive, but getting them to work to deliver the rapid response time that Nintendo needed took a lot of work," Vivaud says.
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