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.
First of all, I think it’s safe to forget the idea of a Wii homebrew community ever arising now. Why hack or spring for a devkit if you already know how to program games for Windows? Why bother exploring the Hollywood and the Broadway if you already know OpenGL? And even more unsettling for Nintendo, why limit yourself to turbo-Gamecube graphics when you could be designing for a GeForce 7800?
This is where it really starts to get tricky—Hello World poses no threat to Nintendo, but what’s to stop a commercial game developer from releasing a PC game that requires a Wiimote? Nintendo can’t sue the developers for processing bluetooth packets—or can they? Nintendo obviously has a patent on the workings of the Wiimote; could they have also patented the process of decoding the remote’s emissions?
For a console whose landmark innovation is its haptic interface, the fact that one may now excise the console itself from its own ecosystem is striking. Perhaps the mantra “it’s the gameplay” is even more important than previously thought: Now that the Wiimote is no longer exclusive to its own console, the Wii can no longer rely on its unique controller. It must have quality platform exclusives a la Wii Sports and Raving Rabbids to survive.
Either way, I hope for Nintendo’s sake the Wiimote’s $40 USD MSRP accounts for a healthy margin. They might need it.
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Don’t you think you’re being a dramatic about all of this? I mean even if everything you said happened, Which isn’t likely. As long as the Wiimote can’t be utilized on other systems isn’t it essentially still exclusive to the Wii as far as consoles go? I mean that is really what matters! anything else would be an added bonus for Nintendo. Homebrew seems like it’s already possible in some ways and it will only grow.
Comment by xylene 12.07.06 @ 8:35 pmLeave a comment
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I don’t think anyone else than geeks will buy a Wiimote without a Wii, and I don’t think any commercial game on PC will ever require a Wiimote.
Additionally, if you want IR to work (which is require to have an acceptable pointing device), you need the Wii sensor, don’t you?
Comment by erwan 12.07.06 @ 7:52 pm