Nintendo Wii Remote Motionplus: Lightsaber game coming

For those of you who have been waiting for a lightsaber game, you will be pleased to hear that we could be getting a step closer to it. Nintendo have now announced a new accessory for the Will called Wii Motionplus.

This new attachment which fits on to the bottom of the Wiimote allows for more accurate responses to the motion that the player makes. Nintndo say that this new attachment will do a better job of “reflecting motions in a 3-D space”.

According to Slippery Brick, the Wii Motionplus fits to the bottom of the controller and works in conjunction with the controller’s accelerometer and the Wii sensor bar, Nintendo say that with all three working together, the motion of the players hand and arm are true 1:1 response.

This is the kind of technology that is needed for many first person shooter games, as well as the long awaited lightsaber game that Wii fans are hoping for.

Although the standard Wii Remote does a great job when tracking your hand and arm movements, it can sometimes be a little shaky. The Wii Motionplus add-on improves the precision of those movements, this will be a great help to so many games.

At this moment there are no details on pricing or a release date.

Nintendo Wii Like Controller Patent: play on Apple TV-based games

We all know how much Apple like to take a trip to the patent office to file a new piece of technology, well Apple have now filed a patent for plans of a 3D remote control system, this will use the same sort of sensing capabilities that we are more used to seeing in a Nintendo Wii remote. Some believe that this piece of technology would be used as some sort of new controller for use with Apple TV based games. This patent was actually filed back in November 2006, so you have to wonder where the product is.

The patent says that the device can also zoom in and out of an image; this would work very well with Apple TV’s photo browsing. The patent also reckons that a console would be able to communicate with the remote by using either a cable or one or more wireless communication protocols; the console that has been described in this patent is able to have one or more connectors of which accessories that can be coupled. The accessories are described as external hard drives, game cartridges, portable memory devices as well as cables and/or game cartridges. Some patent filings cannot be taken as if they will ever make it on to the market, and this is one such device that I do not think that we will see on an Apple device, well what do you expect it is a lot like a Nintendo Wii Remote.

Source - Apple Insider