Another accessory, which is even less expensive, is what Nintendo call a 'Sensor Bar', which enables the infra–red tracking function I mentioned earlier. An accessory to the Wiimote is Nintendo's Nunchuk, which adds two more buttons and a joystick, as well as another three–axis accelerometer, for a mere £15 more. In the nomenclature of flight dynamics, it detects pitch, yaw, and roll.īut that's not all. Thus it not only detects motion, but it also reports the angle you are holding the Wiimote at when it is not moving - and not just one angle, but three: vertical, horizontal, and rotational. (Nintendo reportedly pay about $1.50 each - but they buy millions of them.) It has a sensitivity of 3G, or three times the force of gravity, which means that while it won't do too well if you slam it into a wall, it is sensitive enough to measure the force of gravity itself. The accelerometer is an Analog Devices ADXL 330 - which, if you were to buy a single unit, would cost 50 percent more than the Wiimote itself. ![]() Two–dimensional position tracking allows you to point to an object, real or imaginary, and the Wiimote will know precisely where you're pointing. If you've played some of the more physically oriented games now available for the Wii, you are probably aware of all this, and perhaps you may have thought about what it could mean if all this power were to be channelled into making music. It communicates with its base station using standard Bluetooth technology. In a package the size of a hot dog, it combines 12 buttons, two infra–red sensors for two–dimensional position sensing, and an accelerometer that provides three–dimensional motion detection. And small wonder: for a mere £30 or so, the Wiimote provides interface power that just a couple of years before would have cost literally thousands. First announced in September 2005, the Wiimote didn't ship until 14 months later, and for at least a year following the first shipments, the demand far outstripped the supply. The Wiimote, as its friends call it, is arguably the greatest achievement in game controller history. These days much of the buzz, in the NIME crowd and among hackers all over the world, is about Nintendo's wireless Wii Remote. There's a vast international culture devoted to thinking about these questions and devising possible answers to them, and they meet every year at the New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME) conference, which I reported on in the January 2006 issue of Sound On Sound ( Many in that group make their own interfaces, while others like to use off–the–shelf hardware borrowed from other areas, especially toys. So should we now be making rather more interesting choices about what constitutes a 'musical instrument'? What are the musical instruments of the future? Are we going to be using keyboards, guitars, saxophones, and drum kits forever? Thanks to digital technology, what an instrument sounds like doesn't have to have any connection with what it looks like or how you play it. ![]() ![]() Its potential as a music controller is unlimited, and you don't even need a Wii console to use it! Nintendo's ultra–affordable Wii Remote controller can sense movement in every direction, and even knows at what angle you're holding it.
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