Over the past week, the blog-reading public has seen the Wii remote’s accelerometric sensors intercepted and interpreted by a PC, and today the infrared interface has been cracked. Beyond moving a mouse pointer with the remote, though, the implications of this unintended interfacing could be far more profound that Nintendo seems to have anticipated.
The two pillars of the Wii’s interface technology, accelerometry and triangulation, have fallen. Everything is already, less than a month after release, in place for the Wiimote to become a completely usable PC peripheral. A $40 controller and a $20 bluetooth interface are the most anyone theoretically needs to leverage Wii technology—without a Wii.
The next twelve months for Nintendo may be quite unlike anything they had anticipated.