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Speaker 1: tech Stuff from how stuff works dot com. Hello again, everyone,
Speaker 1: Welcome to tech stuff. My name is Chris Polette and
Speaker 1: I am an editor here at how stuff works dot Com.
Speaker 1: Sitting across from me, as he always does, is senior
Speaker 1: writer Jonathan Strickland. Hey, Chris Polette, why do you always
Speaker 1: introduce me? Second? Because otherwise I'd be going hi? And
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland's here and Chris Polette, Yes, we we had
Speaker 1: a listener asked why I was always listed Second. It
Speaker 1: just because we kind of settled on this routine. And uh,
Speaker 1: once you get a routine, it makes you feel nice
Speaker 1: and comfortable, you don't really want to leave that. And
Speaker 1: so when I tried just a minute ago, I got
Speaker 1: lots and lots of giggles. Yeah, yeah, because it just
Speaker 1: didn't work. Um, rest assured, faithful listeners, I am not
Speaker 1: offended or hurt in any way that I am listed. Second. Uh,
Speaker 1: the fact that I pretty much chatter all over Chris
Speaker 1: whenever he tries to say anything. Uh, I think he
Speaker 1: needs I think he needs top billing all right, So
Speaker 1: let's let's get into the topic. Yes we should, Yes
Speaker 1: we will. What we're gonna talk about today comes to
Speaker 1: us courtesy of a little listener mail. This listener mail
Speaker 1: comes from Jackie, and Jackie had a nice mail message
Speaker 1: was fairly long, so I'm just gonna cut it to
Speaker 1: the chase here and says I had a topic that
Speaker 1: was wondering about how does the WE remote actually work.
Speaker 1: I know it has something to do with the sensor,
Speaker 1: but that's it. Looking ahead the future podcast, I can't
Speaker 1: see any that appeared to cover this topic and think
Speaker 1: that it would make an interesting podcast. Jackie, we agree.
Speaker 1: So we're going to talk about how the WE remote works.
Speaker 1: And we've talked a little bit about the Wei remote
Speaker 1: in the past when we were chatting about the you know,
Speaker 1: the different video game interfaces, but we really wanted to
Speaker 1: dig in and talk about what it is that makes
Speaker 1: the WE remote tick, how how it works, and UM
Speaker 1: kind of some of the neat things that people are
Speaker 1: doing with the Wei remote that perhaps Nintendo didn't really intend. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's uh, it's funny because the pieces that make up
Speaker 1: the WE remote. UM. Actually one of the things that
Speaker 1: people talked about a lot when the Nintendo uh we
Speaker 1: first hit the shelves was the fact that, um, you know,
Speaker 1: people who who were detracting from the machine said, well,
Speaker 1: you know, they didn't use any of the high tech, custom,
Speaker 1: cutting edge components that some of the other manufacturers use.
Speaker 1: But that sort of works in uh well, it works
Speaker 1: in Nintendo's favor in one regard because it keeps the
Speaker 1: cost of the console down here. But um, as it
Speaker 1: turns out, these components are also prized by hackers. People
Speaker 1: like to take stuff apart and do other things with it.
Speaker 1: I've seen many projects, uh cataloged in the pages of
Speaker 1: Make MAGAZINEEN and YouTube and some of the other places
Speaker 1: where people have messed around with it. Um. And it's
Speaker 1: really the WE remote is a hodgepodge of different parts
Speaker 1: um that basically take your movements and interpret them in
Speaker 1: a way that the console can understand and allow you
Speaker 1: to play the games. Right. So let's kind of talk
Speaker 1: about the different parts that are inside your WE remote,
Speaker 1: assuming you have one. Okay, all right, So if you
Speaker 1: were to take your WE remote apart, here's where we say,
Speaker 1: do not take your WE remote apart. People have done
Speaker 1: this for you. You don't need to do it yourself,
Speaker 1: and if you do do it, chances are you won't
Speaker 1: get it back together again. But if you were to
Speaker 1: take it apart first, you would notice that it's held
Speaker 1: together by some pretty wacky screws. The screws are proprietary,
Speaker 1: it's a Nintendo design, um, and it's designed in such
Speaker 1: a way. It's kind of this weird sort of triangular,
Speaker 1: three pronged thing. Uh. It's designed in such a way
Speaker 1: so that it is not easy to remove those screws,
Speaker 1: although you can find and screwdrivers out there, especially for
Speaker 1: Nintendo repair kits that that do have the right um,
Speaker 1: the right head on the screwdriver so that you can
Speaker 1: remove them. Uh. It's held together by about four screws
Speaker 1: and a couple of clips. And once you get that apart,
Speaker 1: that's it. That's the only thing holding this this bob together.
Speaker 1: And we're talking about the main we remote here, not
Speaker 1: the nunchuck or anything like that, right, not the motion
Speaker 1: plus right, not the motion plus either. Right. So once
Speaker 1: you get that apart, you would be essentially looking at
Speaker 1: a plastic casing, two halves of a plastic casing, and
Speaker 1: a circuit board with lots of a little you know,
Speaker 1: microprocessors attached to it. You'd see a speaker there, you'd
Speaker 1: see some buttons. Um. You would also see a little
Speaker 1: motor that would be attached to one to the upper
Speaker 1: side of the we remote that motor. I'll just get
Speaker 1: that out of the way first. That's pretty simple. That's
Speaker 1: the motor that creates the rumble feel that you get
Speaker 1: whenever you have one of those, uh, the force feedback moments. Yeah,
Speaker 1: similar to the kind that you'd find in a cell
Speaker 1: phone that you used for the vibrant mode. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: essentially a little off center rotating cylinder in there that
Speaker 1: rotates and that's what causes the rumble motion. And it
Speaker 1: pretty much just has an on and an off mode.
Speaker 1: That's about it. Though. You can make it feel like
Speaker 1: more of a of a vibration sensation if you turn
Speaker 1: it on and off at a at certain frequencies. That
Speaker 1: can actually make it feel like it's a more intense
Speaker 1: or less intense rumbling. But like we said, it's it's
Speaker 1: it's a bit. It's a binary function. It's either a
Speaker 1: zero or a one on or off. Um. Actually, uh,
Speaker 1: Jonathan and I were when we were doing research for this,
Speaker 1: we found a great article in the I e e
Speaker 1: ES Pervasive Technology magazine from Johnny Chung Lee. Uh, I
Speaker 1: can highly recommend it if you're really interested in hacking this.
Speaker 1: But this is where we found a lot of our information.
Speaker 1: And he gets into lots and lots of detail. Uh.
Speaker 1: He was a doctoral student at Carnegie Mellon University and
Speaker 1: is now part of Microsoft's team. I believe he has
Speaker 1: a pretty cool blog out there too. Um. But yeah,
Speaker 1: so there we we got some really really good details
Speaker 1: on this. And should we get into the individual components.
Speaker 1: I want to talk about those. Um, you know, the
Speaker 1: first thing, uh, you know a lot of people think
Speaker 1: about is that three axis accelerometer that's inside the machine
Speaker 1: and analog devices. Is the company that created that yep, yep.
Speaker 1: And uh, basically you'd find these in other all kinds
Speaker 1: of other technologies to they're they're pretty common these days.
Speaker 1: Cell phone and you know the iPod and iPhone and iPad.
Speaker 1: These are the sort of these are the sort of
Speaker 1: sensors that allow the devices to know which way they
Speaker 1: are oriented. So like for instance, an iPhone or an
Speaker 1: iPod touch it would tell that it's whether it's in
Speaker 1: landscape or or portrait mode. So the screen would flip accordingly,
Speaker 1: same sort of thing, except in this case this the
Speaker 1: accelerometer is helping the um the we uh figure out
Speaker 1: what the orientation is of the WE remote itself, so
Speaker 1: the pitch, the yaw, the role um as you move
Speaker 1: it around. This is y'all, it's yeah, it's one of
Speaker 1: the This is one of the ways that the WE
Speaker 1: detect how you're holding the remote and thus can interpret
Speaker 1: your actions within a game or you know, a menu
Speaker 1: system or whatever. It's just one of the ways, but
Speaker 1: it's it's the one that that got a lot of
Speaker 1: press early on. And uh, I read one review where
Speaker 1: it was kind of interesting where they're talking about taking
Speaker 1: a part that WE remote and finding just a tiny
Speaker 1: bit of disappointment that there weren't actual tiny little gyroscopes
Speaker 1: in there to indicate the because the gyroscope is a
Speaker 1: you know, it's a good old way of figuring out
Speaker 1: the um the orientation of a of any sort of surface, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, that's kind of what we what NASA uses
Speaker 1: in a lot of it's the early spacecraft where gyroscopes
Speaker 1: too to be able to make adjustments to the pitch
Speaker 1: and y'all. But no, no, this is just a little
Speaker 1: like tonic chip that essentially does the same thing it uses.
Speaker 1: You know, it detects different changes in fields. So um,
Speaker 1: but it's there is no actual little moving gyroscope inside
Speaker 1: your Wii remote. No gyroscopes, no jack's, no tinker toys,
Speaker 1: you know. Um, sorry I got out track there. But
Speaker 1: there is an I R camera, an infrared camera manufactured
Speaker 1: by Pixart Imaging. Um that's got a multi object tracking
Speaker 1: engine in it. It can even it can keep track
Speaker 1: of four simultaneous infrared light sources. You know. This is
Speaker 1: what allows you to do lots of really cool hacking tricks,
Speaker 1: which will give into a little bit later. But if
Speaker 1: you're like me, you might be a little surprised. I
Speaker 1: was thinking that would be an I R sensor right,
Speaker 1: not not not a or not not a sense I'm sorry,
Speaker 1: and I are emitter, and that the sensor itself would
Speaker 1: be on your television. You know that you have a
Speaker 1: sensor bar that you put above the TV. Because it
Speaker 1: turns out it doesn't really sense, no, it it's emitting. Yes, Um,
Speaker 1: so it turns out that the uh that it's swapped around, right,
Speaker 1: I thought, because when you think of like a remote control.
Speaker 1: When you press a button, you think, oh, I'm sending
Speaker 1: a signal to the television or to the you know whatever,
Speaker 1: the cable box, and that the cable box is a receiver,
Speaker 1: and so that's how that's working. No, it's the other
Speaker 1: way around with the WE remote. The the remote itself
Speaker 1: is the sensor, and the sensor bar is actually the transceiver.
Speaker 1: It's transmitter, actually not transceiver, but a transmitter UM. So
Speaker 1: you've got at the end of your Wi remote this
Speaker 1: sensor that detects uh infrared UM signals. And that's again
Speaker 1: we'll get into it, but that's kind of the secret
Speaker 1: behind we hacks and why the Wei remote has become very, uh,
Speaker 1: a very useful tool for hackers. Uh. Let's see what else.
Speaker 1: What else? It's got four little blue LEDs in there
Speaker 1: tell you whether you're player one, two, three, or four.
Speaker 1: The buttons, of course, are on little sensors. So every
Speaker 1: time we press a button, that activates the sensor and
Speaker 1: and the uh. When you get down to the point
Speaker 1: of taking a Wei remote apart um, there are a
Speaker 1: lot of buttons there. It's twelve buttons total, and four
Speaker 1: of those would be the direction pad. A lot of
Speaker 1: people just think of the direction pad as a single unit.
Speaker 1: But yeah, technically it's four buttons. Um and uh, well,
Speaker 1: it's got an expansion poured, it's got it's got the
Speaker 1: port for the nunchuck or we motion. Plus it's a
Speaker 1: proprietary six pin plug that's Nintendo's own memory. Yes, it
Speaker 1: does have memory. It's got five point five kilobytes of
Speaker 1: on board flash memory, which is good for storing your
Speaker 1: ME if you're going to take your ME with you
Speaker 1: as you go to a friend's house to play. Um,
Speaker 1: just a little bit of information there. It doesn't it
Speaker 1: doesn't store lots and lots of data, all right. There's
Speaker 1: the speaker you mentioned that earlier. Yes, so that you
Speaker 1: actually can get sound out of the Wei remote. So
Speaker 1: if you're playing something like a Star Wars game and
Speaker 1: you fire up that lightsaber, you get the nice little
Speaker 1: wall wow noises coming straight from your controller and not
Speaker 1: from necessarily just the TV. UM and uh. It has
Speaker 1: a Bluetooth chip. Yes, it does. Is another reason why
Speaker 1: hackers like it so much, because it makes it easy
Speaker 1: to connect to various PC programs that have a Bluetooth
Speaker 1: enabled UM uh component. Yeah, it's a it's the Broadcom
Speaker 1: two chip UM. It's uh, it's not a dent human
Speaker 1: interface design compliant, which means you might if you are
Speaker 1: going to try hacking the Wei remote yourself, UM, you're
Speaker 1: gonna have you might have some difficulty connecting it to
Speaker 1: a computer. Although according to what Lee said, it's probably
Speaker 1: the hardest part of actually uh doing a lot of
Speaker 1: work with it is getting it to connect with a
Speaker 1: particular computer. So what it depends on the computer, I think,
Speaker 1: and whether or not you can you can detect it
Speaker 1: easily or not. But but yeah, it does. That does
Speaker 1: help out in the hacking department. I forgot about one
Speaker 1: other component that you would notice if you were looking
Speaker 1: at the circuit board, a capacitor. I am, there's actually
Speaker 1: quite large capacitor on the end opposite of the UH
Speaker 1: the I R sensor UM. The capacitor is is probably
Speaker 1: probably provides some power to things like the accessories that
Speaker 1: you can plug into the base of the Wii remote
Speaker 1: for example, Again the nun chuck um, which on its
Speaker 1: own does not have any battery power. It's it draws
Speaker 1: all its power from or doesn't have battery power. And
Speaker 1: note I can't remember it's been so long since I've
Speaker 1: used my Wii. Um, what the way were on the
Speaker 1: nun chuck. The nunchuck doesn't have a battery on board.
Speaker 1: I didn't think it did. But as soon as I said,
Speaker 1: I was like, whoa wait, if I'm wrong about that,
Speaker 1: people are going to write in the will it's been
Speaker 1: so this shows how long it's been since I've used
Speaker 1: my Wii remote. Well, I do have in my notes
Speaker 1: the connector is a proprietary Oh I said that, but
Speaker 1: it does provide three point three volts of power and
Speaker 1: four hurts of twelve C serial communication. Okay, so that's
Speaker 1: where the nunchuck is drawing its energy from. The battery
Speaker 1: provides the power to the capacitory. Topacitory can provide power
Speaker 1: to the nunchuck. Um. Also, I mean the dun check
Speaker 1: is gonna draw power from the we remote batteries as well. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And if you are using batteries, um, instead of a
Speaker 1: rechargeable battery of some type, um, you know, like they
Speaker 1: have the third party and uh um the battery packs
Speaker 1: that you can actually plug in battery or charging stations. Um.
Speaker 1: But if you were using just a standard pair of
Speaker 1: double A batteries, you're gonna get about twenty to forty
Speaker 1: hours of battery life. Yeah, that's not that's not terrible.
Speaker 1: Now when you think about it, I mean considering you know,
Speaker 1: the sort of functions that you're using this this WE
Speaker 1: remote for now, if you're using the Wii remote for
Speaker 1: something static, you're using the Wii remote as a detector
Speaker 1: um the way a lot of hacking projects use it. Uh,
Speaker 1: it probably will last longer than if you were to,
Speaker 1: you know, use it as a full um video game controller,
Speaker 1: because then you're activating the accelerometer, the rumble pack, all
Speaker 1: that kind of stuff, and that's going to drain more
Speaker 1: power than if it's just being used as a sensor.
Speaker 1: Now where should we go from here? Well, if you
Speaker 1: think now, that's I mean, that is exactly how it works.
Speaker 1: You're talking about again, the sensor bar has the LED
Speaker 1: lights inside it, so it's the transmitter, not really a sensor. Oh.
Speaker 1: We we should point out the function of the censor
Speaker 1: bar because somebody might say, hey, you know it's got
Speaker 1: all that stuff inside the controller, why do you need
Speaker 1: the sensor bar. The censor bar helps orient the WE
Speaker 1: remote and the WE so the WE knows pretty much
Speaker 1: where the player is. Um. You know, if you start
Speaker 1: anybody who has a WE and especially in someone who
Speaker 1: has a someone like me as a pretty small living room,
Speaker 1: if you you'll find that you step if you step
Speaker 1: close to the TV suddenly or we may go wait
Speaker 1: a minute, I don't wear Hey, where did you go? Well,
Speaker 1: it's the the center bar and the camera on the
Speaker 1: WE remote are basically telling the WE roughly where you are,
Speaker 1: and if you make a sudden shift forward or backward suddenly,
Speaker 1: that we might take a minute to reorient you. And
Speaker 1: that's that's what that lag time is, is the censor
Speaker 1: bar and I our camera basically figuring out what happened,
Speaker 1: and the WE motion plus takes care of a lot
Speaker 1: of that. That does help. That helped quite a bit
Speaker 1: so that it could give more accuracy as far as
Speaker 1: depth goes. And uh so, yeah, the censor bar is
Speaker 1: actually got lights inside it ELI d Infra red lights,
Speaker 1: so not we're not talking visible lights, it's outside the
Speaker 1: visible spectrum, but they're constantly sending light out and the
Speaker 1: censor at the end of the WE remote picks up
Speaker 1: that light and that's what and through the Bluetooth chip
Speaker 1: can transmit to the wii UM the orientation of the
Speaker 1: remote based upon things like the accelerometer and how much
Speaker 1: of the light it's sensing from the sensor bar. Now,
Speaker 1: if you were to decide to hack this, you're looking
Speaker 1: mostly at the Wei remote as your your device. You know,
Speaker 1: you don't even need the we anymore if you want to.
Speaker 1: If you're if you're talking about a hack job where
Speaker 1: you want to use the the WE remote as a sensor,
Speaker 1: what you would need is some sort of of either
Speaker 1: reflective tape or an l e D i R light
Speaker 1: infra red light, so an infrared l e ED. We're
Speaker 1: not talking about your average l d's that light up
Speaker 1: red or green or blue or whatever. It would be
Speaker 1: lighting up in the infrared spectrum. Now, I've seen some
Speaker 1: really cool applications for this. The one in the article
Speaker 1: was actually pretty neat. Where was talking about using uh,
Speaker 1: the l and an l e D marker. So you're
Speaker 1: it'll looks like a marker, like you know, like a
Speaker 1: like a sharpie, Yes, but it has an l e
Speaker 1: ED infrared light at the end of it. And then
Speaker 1: you could project on a screen a um projected a
Speaker 1: white board and you could write on the white board
Speaker 1: with the l e ED light. Very cool. That's pretty nifty.
Speaker 1: But the one that I really like was an a
Speaker 1: Wee Ferreman. Yeah. Interesting, it was a fairman where the Fairman,
Speaker 1: if you aren't familiar, is h this wacky musical instrument
Speaker 1: that um you usually play by having a you have
Speaker 1: a pair of sensors really um and as you get
Speaker 1: closer and further away from him, you can adjust the
Speaker 1: pitch and volume of a sound. And it's that weird
Speaker 1: like wah wah, I'm noisy here in the old like
Speaker 1: nineteen fifties b science fiction movies and almost in in
Speaker 1: some ways it reminds me of a saw people playing
Speaker 1: a saw, right, but you can identify the I mean
Speaker 1: it sounds electric. Yeah, there is a difference in the
Speaker 1: the eerieness of it sort of reminds me of saw
Speaker 1: what it's like, and our keen eared listeners will pick
Speaker 1: up on the Stephen King reference I just threw in there,
Speaker 1: but yeah, it's the idea of the traditional thereman is
Speaker 1: by moving your hands further closer, further away, or up
Speaker 1: and down these various u UM bars, you can make
Speaker 1: uh this weird sound. Well, it's kind of a similar
Speaker 1: idea with the the the Nintendo we hack, the we
Speaker 1: remote acts as the sensor and you use a pair
Speaker 1: of gloves. Where the guy who did this hack, he
Speaker 1: used a pair of gloves and he put an L
Speaker 1: E D light at the tip of the forefinger of
Speaker 1: each of the gloves, all right, and then by orienting
Speaker 1: his hands, he could move one L E D up
Speaker 1: and that would be the the I think it was
Speaker 1: the volume, and he could move the other led closer
Speaker 1: or further away from the center that WE remote, and
Speaker 1: that ended up being the pitch. And so he created
Speaker 1: a virtual thereman, which if you've ever looked into the
Speaker 1: plans for building a thereman, these things are fiendishly complicated.
Speaker 1: They're not easy to build. Um. I actually know a guy.
Speaker 1: I know a guy who did build one, and it
Speaker 1: took him quite a while to do it because it's
Speaker 1: just it's it's a pretty complicated build. Um. But by
Speaker 1: using some software the that I think the guy actually
Speaker 1: wrote the software who created the hack, And this I
Speaker 1: saw on YouTube. I just did a YouTube where I
Speaker 1: did a I think I was searching Theraman's at the
Speaker 1: time and I saw this cool WE remote hack. But
Speaker 1: using the WE remote as the sensor, it's the one
Speaker 1: that's picking up where the led lights are coming from
Speaker 1: UM and then running that through this software, he was
Speaker 1: able to create the Freman UM, the virtual Freman. Yeah.
Speaker 1: It's matter of fact, I've seen, uh seeing quite a
Speaker 1: few we instrument type hacks. UM. The guy who had
Speaker 1: created this entire percussion uh ensemble where different kinds of
Speaker 1: instruments where he had it was really involved lots and
Speaker 1: lots of servos uh and other little robotic things used
Speaker 1: to strike the drums, you know. And UM he had
Speaker 1: it set up where he could use the Wii remote
Speaker 1: to control what would be played at what time, and
Speaker 1: it was very very fascinating us. Uh quite a few
Speaker 1: videos on YouTube like that. UM. And uh, you know,
Speaker 1: I'm curious, why would somebody bother if you, if you
Speaker 1: these parts are basically off the shelf parts, why would
Speaker 1: you say that people actually bother taking the time to
Speaker 1: hack the Wii remote instead of going to get an
Speaker 1: accelerometer and you know the l ed s it's already
Speaker 1: made for you. That's a big thing. So it's it's
Speaker 1: essentially like uh like going to for example, the maker
Speaker 1: shed and getting an argue know board, and you know
Speaker 1: it's already You've got the components that you need to
Speaker 1: do it, and all you have to do is pull
Speaker 1: it apart and do what you're going to do with it.
Speaker 1: That's part of it, I think. But I think another part.
Speaker 1: I mean, you've already, like I said, You've already got
Speaker 1: the components put together. You've got the Bluetooth component, which
Speaker 1: is a big part of it. UM, You've got the
Speaker 1: the infrared sensor there, and it's already all wired together
Speaker 1: in a circuit board UM. And it's in a very
Speaker 1: compact format, and it's cheap. You know, it's already put
Speaker 1: together in a in a relatively cheap way. We've talked
Speaker 1: a little bit about some industries, like say, the virtual
Speaker 1: reality industry, although it's most people tend to call it
Speaker 1: virtual environments now or they call it something totally different. Well,
Speaker 1: it's hard to get funding for virtual reality and virtual
Speaker 1: environment projects. It's the the public, uh, perception of virtual
Speaker 1: reality was not accurate back when the term really took
Speaker 1: off in the nineties, right because we all heard about
Speaker 1: virtual reality, and we all heard that we were going
Speaker 1: to be living in this virtual space. And once people
Speaker 1: found out what what, how far along virtual reality actually was,
Speaker 1: the bottom dropped out of it because it did not
Speaker 1: live up to what our expectations were because a few
Speaker 1: people kind of overhyped it, and as a result, those
Speaker 1: projects lost a lot of support and it became more
Speaker 1: and more difficult to get funding for those projects. Even
Speaker 1: though the work was still very much, very important, it
Speaker 1: just wasn't as far along as everyone thought it was. Well,
Speaker 1: industries like the virtual reality industry started turning towards the
Speaker 1: video game industry for a lot of their UM, a
Speaker 1: lot of their their equipment. They just cannibalize whatever they
Speaker 1: could the video game industry, and the we mote is
Speaker 1: a good example of that. Um You can use the
Speaker 1: we mote to UH to create a kind of virtual environment.
Speaker 1: One of a good example actually that's in that article
Speaker 1: that you mentioned, was a pair of glasses that allows
Speaker 1: you to create a parallax view of virtual environment where
Speaker 1: you would put essentially you have a pair of glasses
Speaker 1: and on either side of the glasses would be one
Speaker 1: of these l e ED emitters infrared emitters. You use
Speaker 1: the Wii remote as the sensor. You would build a
Speaker 1: virtual environment, and you would link the we remote to
Speaker 1: the virtual environment. You put on a pair of glasses,
Speaker 1: so you're viewing the virtual environment, and as you turn
Speaker 1: your head, because the Wii remote catches the L E
Speaker 1: D s and finds the different orientation, it would change
Speaker 1: your view of the virtual environment as you turn your head,
Speaker 1: so it's like you're looking into a three D environment.
Speaker 1: So you know, as you look at a flat screen,
Speaker 1: but you turn your head left or right, and because
Speaker 1: the orientation of the lights is different with the Wii remote,
Speaker 1: it changes your view on the screen and it looks
Speaker 1: like a three D environm Man, it's pretty cool. I've
Speaker 1: actually seen that kind of uh displayed once before. It's
Speaker 1: a little hard to explain. There are videos on YouTube
Speaker 1: of this this uh, this effect. Um. It's a pretty cool,
Speaker 1: very simple virtual reality implementation. But it's the sort of
Speaker 1: thing that that the VR experts really get excited about
Speaker 1: because it's within, it's you know, much more affordable, and
Speaker 1: it's really accessible. It's not like there's only one of
Speaker 1: these devices in the world. You can just run down
Speaker 1: to an electronics store and buy one, you know, by
Speaker 1: by we remote off the shelf, and then with some
Speaker 1: software and a little hacking that you're done. You've got
Speaker 1: yourself a virtual virtual reality machine. Yeah. Yeah, And I
Speaker 1: was thinking too that the the other factor that plays
Speaker 1: into this is the hacking factor, which is the idea
Speaker 1: that you're taking something that already exists apart and doing
Speaker 1: something with it that was not originally in tended. What's
Speaker 1: just adds to the fun of doing that. That's the
Speaker 1: classic hacking ethos. Yes, I mean that goes way back
Speaker 1: before computer is even to like hacking the telephone system,
Speaker 1: where you you create ways of making it do things
Speaker 1: that it wasn't meant to do. We should totally do
Speaker 1: a podcast on that, all about phone freaks. Yeah, we
Speaker 1: could do that. That's a good example, all right, write
Speaker 1: it down, Okay. In a future podcast we will talk
Speaker 1: about phone freaking. Okay, Steve Jobs will feature heavily in that,
Speaker 1: I'm sure, and we can get on the phone. That
Speaker 1: would be awesome. Um well, we've already talked about project
Speaker 1: at all in previous podcasts, but we haven't really gotten
Speaker 1: into the latest developments on the Sony move, like, for example,
Speaker 1: we actually have a name for it now. Um, we
Speaker 1: used to call it just the wand yeah, well it
Speaker 1: looks sort of like a wand it's uh, it's got
Speaker 1: a glowing ball on one end. But it will officially
Speaker 1: make its debut this fall. Um, the Kid's gonna cost
Speaker 1: a hundred dollars. It's got it will have a game
Speaker 1: in it and a camera. It also uses a camera
Speaker 1: to help capture movement more like more like New Tall
Speaker 1: than We, which is sort of backwards from that, right,
Speaker 1: but the camera is on the device end, like the
Speaker 1: television end, rather than on the the controller end. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but people seem, especially the PlayStation three fans, the hardcore fans,
Speaker 1: seem pretty excited about it. Um you know, going to
Speaker 1: be able to do motion controller work with a lot
Speaker 1: of the games. UM. And it too will also have
Speaker 1: another UM sub controller for the other hand. UM, so
Speaker 1: you know you'll you'll be able to use both hands,
Speaker 1: not just the one right when you're playing PlayStation three games.
Speaker 1: But interesting how this all has moved so rapidly and
Speaker 1: has become such an important part of console gaming and
Speaker 1: even even computer gaming because now that people are doing
Speaker 1: that and using um, you know, the motion sensing capabilities
Speaker 1: of these different components. Yeah, I think so and Microsoft both,
Speaker 1: I mean they both clearly had these projects in development
Speaker 1: before the The We debut, because I mean these are
Speaker 1: long term projects or not something that you you know,
Speaker 1: just turn around very quickly. However, I think that the success,
Speaker 1: especially the early success of the we probably put them
Speaker 1: on the fast track on in Sony and Microsoft's case.
Speaker 1: One of the interesting things I noticed about Project Natal
Speaker 1: I just did a quick look to see if you know,
Speaker 1: more information about it, just sort of the stuff that
Speaker 1: we figured out since the unveiling at E three last year.
Speaker 1: UM pretty quiet, really, you know, did they at least
Speaker 1: did the consumer. But the one of the interesting things
Speaker 1: I saw was read up on on how the brain
Speaker 1: interprets the you know, it's what Microsoft refers to as
Speaker 1: the brain Natal's brain, not not the human brain, but
Speaker 1: how the natal brain interprets motion and uh and your
Speaker 1: posture in order to transfer that into a a in
Speaker 1: game action and uh. Essentially, what it does is when
Speaker 1: the cameras pointing at you, Natal software is scanning your
Speaker 1: body and uh and matching it with a database of
Speaker 1: virtual skeletons. Yeah. So yeah, there's this whole database of
Speaker 1: different skeletons that it it has within its memory, and
Speaker 1: it kind of matches you to the one that it
Speaker 1: thinks it fits you the best. It looks at your
Speaker 1: form and then says, okay, Uh, this point here, that's
Speaker 1: a hand. That point over there that's the other hand.
Speaker 1: This must be an elbow, that must be a shoulder.
Speaker 1: There's like thirty different points that it matches up to
Speaker 1: a virtual skeleton. And uh, because it doesn't automatically know.
Speaker 1: It's not like the camera magically knows that your hand
Speaker 1: is your hand. It's interpreting it based upon previous information.
Speaker 1: And uh, the more you use the natal feature, the
Speaker 1: more it kind of figures out, you know, oh, well
Speaker 1: this I thought that was his hand, turns out this
Speaker 1: is actually his hand, right, Because I mean, it doesn't
Speaker 1: know automatically right now, it's not not doesn't magically understand,
Speaker 1: you know. And we're all we're all different shapes and sizes,
Speaker 1: so and depending on what you're wearing, that might also
Speaker 1: kind of confuse it, Like a shirt might make it
Speaker 1: think that your elbow is in one location when in
Speaker 1: reality it's in another. And when it sees that you've
Speaker 1: bend a certain way, it's like, well, either his arm
Speaker 1: is broken or his elbows actually over here. So it
Speaker 1: looks at your body, it compares it to its database
Speaker 1: of virtual skeletons. It matches you up, and it does
Speaker 1: this in just a couple of milliseconds um. And it
Speaker 1: has to because if it didn't, then the games wouldn't
Speaker 1: work because it does this thirty times a second, because
Speaker 1: as you move, it has to adjust your the skeleton.
Speaker 1: That makes sense, It's just right. Yeah, it's really really fast.
Speaker 1: Even so, I've heard people who have used the NATAL system,
Speaker 1: or at least the the prototypes, say that there is
Speaker 1: a perceptible lag. It's not a big surprise because it
Speaker 1: turns out that we can perceive a lag of just
Speaker 1: a few milliseconds um. You have to drop that down
Speaker 1: as low as possible if you want to avoid like
Speaker 1: within virtual reality, you gotta drop it down because if
Speaker 1: you don't, you get virtual seasickness because as you turn
Speaker 1: your head and then the virtual environment changes to reflect that.
Speaker 1: If it's not seamless, it makes you feel a little disoriented,
Speaker 1: and you can actually get motion sickness from virtual reality
Speaker 1: if it's not matched up close enough. The same thing
Speaker 1: when at all, If you see an action on the
Speaker 1: screen and you react to it, if it's not really fast,
Speaker 1: then you're gonna you know, you're gonna get killed in
Speaker 1: the game. You see something coming at you and you
Speaker 1: react and then in turn, the game has to react
Speaker 1: to your reaction. If it's not really seamless, than it's
Speaker 1: gonna be a very frustrating gaming experience. Yeah, it's it
Speaker 1: ends up being a little more of a lag than
Speaker 1: say that we remote. It's it's not as instant a
Speaker 1: feedback loop as whether we remote. So okay, then well
Speaker 1: the moment, that's all I got too. So I guess
Speaker 1: this will take us to a little listener mail. This
Speaker 1: listener mail comes from Andrew. And Andrew says, Hey, guys,
Speaker 1: I'll listen to your amateur radio episode last night, and
Speaker 1: I'm just curious what is the purpose of having licenses
Speaker 1: for different radio frequencies and such. Is it just a
Speaker 1: way for the government to make some extra cash or
Speaker 1: is it dangerous to the environment or people. I'm just curious,
Speaker 1: whine matters whether someone transmits radio signals without a license.
Speaker 1: What harm is being done besides the government not making money?
Speaker 1: Thanks guys, Well, I wrote back to Andrew already, but
Speaker 1: I thought this might be an interesting thing for our
Speaker 1: listeners to hear. Um. It's really a matter of of
Speaker 1: just uh managing all those different radio frequencies. If you're
Speaker 1: broadcasting over a certain radio frequency within a particular geographic location.
Speaker 1: Let's say it's a radio frequency that doesn't really go
Speaker 1: that far but within your town. Um, other people can't
Speaker 1: really broadcast on that frequency. Um or if someone already
Speaker 1: is broadcasting on the frequency, you're essentially creating interference for
Speaker 1: that person because you can only really transmit or receive
Speaker 1: over one frequency uh at a at a time. I
Speaker 1: may you can receive from one frequency and transmit over
Speaker 1: a different one, and that's how you can have a
Speaker 1: conversation with somebody. But it's really managing that making sure
Speaker 1: that you don't have this cacophony of noises and interference
Speaker 1: uh happen over any particular frequency. Yeah, we talked about
Speaker 1: how ham radio got its name and for the people
Speaker 1: who are basically talking over everyone else, you know, they
Speaker 1: were the hands they were doing and and so the
Speaker 1: license is really so that you understand this kind of stuff.
Speaker 1: It's for the government to know that you know what
Speaker 1: you're doing and that you're not gonna end up, say
Speaker 1: broadcasting over a dedicated bandwidth for something like radio frequencies
Speaker 1: or television frequencies or emergency frequencies. And that was the
Speaker 1: point also of having the network, right, So that's really
Speaker 1: the whole point of the licensing is really to make
Speaker 1: sure that you know what you're doing and you're not
Speaker 1: gonna end up causing trouble for everybody else. So it's
Speaker 1: not just an idea of you know, not some sort
Speaker 1: of money making scheme, because I'm pretty sure the government
Speaker 1: is not making money hand over fist with licensing fees.
Speaker 1: But um, good question. If any of you have any
Speaker 1: questions for us, write us our email addresses tex stuff
Speaker 1: at how stuff works dot com And we have an
Speaker 1: article on how stuff works dot com about the Nintendo
Speaker 1: we so if you want to learn more about it,
Speaker 1: I recommend you go there and check it out and
Speaker 1: we will talk to you again really soon for moral
Speaker 1: this and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff
Speaker 1: works dot com and be sure to check out the
Speaker 1: new tech stuff blog now on the house stuff Works homepage,
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