Take a look through your gaming connection. Do you have any of the Guitar Hero franchise? Rock Band? Any of the Buzz games, or the Scene It? Games? I do, and yet I consider myself a hardcore gamer yet these are “casual” games. Games that you can pick up and play for 10 minutes or play for hours. Games that are primarily targeted towards people playing together, but who aren’t necessarily bothered to play all the way through to the end. Rewind four or five years, and games like this were few and far between, and the main staple of games are action games, first person shooters and racing games that took months to fully complete. So why the change?
A company called Cam-Trax is developing software that allows almost any object to be used as an input device for a PC. Using a standard webcam, the software can be configured to recognise an object, track its movements and feed the input into a game or application. See it work in their demo video. They claim to be nearly ready to release a beta version but I suspect they’re being optimistic. Watching the bouncing ball demo reminded me of the EyeToy for PlayStation which was… well, not very good. But the way this tracks the contours of objects rather than human hands makes me think it will be much more reliable.
The stuff you can do with a Wii remote is pretty cool but how much cooler would it be to use anything as an input?
The BBC announced yesterday on their Internet blog that the BBC iPlayer will soon be available on the Nintendo Wii.
We’re big Wii fans here and this is yet another reason to buy one 
If you haven’t already seen the videos of Johnny Lee’s work with the Nintendo Wii remote, prepare to be amazed. His first two demos – Minority Report-style finger tracking and a multi-touch display that can be projected onto any surface – are cool enough but his latest effort defies belief.
Check it out: Head Tracking for Desktop VR Displays using the Wii Remote.
The latest figures out on the sales of Xbox & Wii games consoles, show the two platforms nearly neck and neck at 9.4m for the Wii and 10.1m for the XBox. What’s interesting about these numbers though is that it took Nintendo 1/2 of the time to get there than Microsoft.
Where will it end up though? Industry experts are expecting the Wii to overtake the XBox around Christmas time. But does it really matter? After all, competition is good for eveyone (especially the consumer – Sony have started to drop the price of their PS3 due to “poor” sales figures)
The Wii has caught the imagination of kids (big and small alike), the XBox & PS3 are for the “serious” gamer.
Personally, I think they all have their place and they will do just fine in their own way – but it will create a whole host of problems going forward with regard to the “living room” entertainment system if they all don’t start to adopt more open platforms to allow content to get to and from the devices more easily. For example, I don’t want to be locked into one proprietary device to view my photo’s / video’s over the network onto my screen.
Me, I’m not a gamer (by any stretch of the imagination) but I bought the Wii because its great when you have 3 young children in the house on a rainy day. All they have to do now is make Zelda easier for me
regards
Dean
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