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It'll make economic sense when the consumer can get the controller for under $50 and can make use of it with software they already have.

I put together an Elmo game

http://blog.dawnofthegeeks.com/2009/01/08/elmos-world-the-video-game/

for my daughter who's not quite 2 yet using the Wiimote and the XNA Game Library. But since it costs $40-50 for the controller plus $20 or so for a bluetooth adapter there's probably not going to be much demand for Wiimote enabled games on the PC.

However if PCs came equipped by default with a bluetooth adapter and games started making the Wiimote an optional controller it would be tempting for people to purchase a Wiimote even if they don't have a Wii.

Likewise if this TrueMotion controller costs as much or less than any other high end game controller and has a lot of support in existing games people would spend the money to get it. The TrueMotion people need to work with Valve, Id and others to encourage them to come out with a free patch that makes the TrueMotion controller work with the popular games already out.

The only thing I don't like about using the Wiimote with the PC is that connecting isn't as easy as pressing the A button. If TrueMotion is easy to use for the consumer and gets below $50 I'd definitly switch from messing with the Wiimote.

http://blog.dawnofthegeeks.com/2009/01/01/a-better-wiimote-pointer/

You have to use the accelerometer data and the IR data in order to figure out where the wiimote is located in 3D space and what direction it is pointing.

http://blog.dawnofthegeeks.com/2009/01/08/elmos-world-the-video-game/

Elmo's World: The Video Game is a homebrew product with 3 mini games demonstrating the use of the Wiimote as a pointing device.

The TrueMotion controller uses a lot more sophisticated materials and methods to get a more accurate reporting of location and direction of the pointer. The biggest advantage is not having to be pointed at a light source so you can face it away from the screen and its location is still known.

With the Wiimote the Wii has to make some assumptions about location when the Wiimote can't see the IR lights. In those cases it tries to make use of the accelerometers to figure out how the wiimote is moving to keep everything accurate. As soon as two IR light sources are in view it can get the (somewhat) exact location again.

It wouldn't surprise me if Nintendo as some point releases an updated Wiimote that does away with the IR sensor. The issue for them is always cost. Nintendo seems to try to make the best use of current technology that can be assembled under a certain price point. If they could build a TrueMotion like system and sell it for no more than the current Wiimote they'd most likely do it. In the meantime the Wiimote as is works well enough and meets the price requirements.

http://blog.dawnofthegeeks.com/2009/01/01/a-better-wiimote-pointer/

You have to use the accelerometer data and the IR data in order to figure out where the wiimote is located in 3D space and what direction it is pointing.

http://blog.dawnofthegeeks.com/2009/01/08/elmos-world-the-video-game/

Elmo's World: The Video Game is a homebrew product with 3 mini games demonstrating the use of the Wiimote as a pointing device.

The TrueMotion controller uses a lot more sophisticated materials and methods to get a more accurate reporting of location and direction of the pointer. The biggest advantage is not having to be pointed at a light source so you can face it away from the screen and its location is still known.

With the Wiimote the Wii has to make some assumptions about location when the Wiimote can't see the IR lights. In those cases it tries to make use of the accelerometers to figure out how the wiimote is moving to keep everything accurate. As soon as two IR light sources are in view it can get the (somewhat) exact location again.

It wouldn't surprise me if Nintendo as some point releases an updated Wiimote that does away with the IR sensor. The issue for them is always cost. Nintendo seems to try to make the best use of current technology that can be assembled under a certain price point. If they could build a TrueMotion like system and sell it for no more than the current Wiimote they'd most likely do it. In the meantime the Wiimote as is works well enough and meets the price requirements.

http://blog.dawnofthegeeks.com/2009/01/01/a-better-wiimote-pointer/

If you download and try Johnny Lee's headtracking demo you soon realize you can't tilt your head. It's because he's using the raw information from Brian Peek's library which doesn't tell you where the wiimote is actually pointing.

The above link has a demo that uses Brian Peek's library and some additional code to allow you to use the Wiimote as a pointing device.

I'd rather spend $50 for a Wiimote and $15 for a Wii "sensor" bar than have to buy a whole new PC just to be able to use a pointing device like the Wiimote.

Carpool is a simple Google Maps based app I wrote.

Your employer (or you) can create an account for your place of work. All the employees can then create an account and join the account created for the workplace. Just send your coworkers the username and public password for the place of business so they can join the group. The public password can't be used to log into the account. It's just to help maintain your privacy.

You can then see (or have the site tell you an approximation of) who would be best to carpool with.

Even though I live 50 miles out of town I always seem to find at least one coworker to carpool with which cuts my gas bill in half.

For the curious, I'd have to drive 1 million miles at $4 a gallon before I spend as much money in gas as I save on my mortgage.

http://cubia.dawnofthegeeks.com/ is a mirror of wikipedia that takes takes the mediawiki database and converts it into a static easy to manage database. To find an article in the DB the title is lc'd and MD5'd and the first two characters are the table and then the entire MD5 is the key for the entry in the table.

Throw in a MediaWiki parser and you have your own lightweight mirror. Every page has a link back to the original Wikipedia entry.

Not so surprisingly a 933Mhz system can't handle Wikipedia. But it can handle my version.

This setup also works on GoDaddy.

BTW, step 2 is "Ads"

Step 1: find a pile of free information on the net and host it
Step 2: put ads on it
Step 3: profit!

Script kiddies like to skip step 1 because they're too lazy to find a way to make the pile of information easily managable with limited resources.

Bunnies, http://www.dawnofthegeeks.com/ (a Wolf3D clone) was originally written in Java. I then started translating it to C# and got about a 50% speed boost. I'm now able to do bump mapping, higher resolutions and still have playable framerates.

And this is just for Ray Casting which is much simpler than Ray Tracing.

During my development with Java I discovered that setting a pixel color to 0xFF000000 caused a slowdown. That's right, a black pixel would slow the framerate down. I had to set all pure black pixels to not quite black pixels.

http://www.dawnofthegeeks.com/index.php?page=blog&offset=58

I also found that Java is much slower at doing a "v++" than C.

Those quirks aren't a big deal when you're not trying to do a lot of math. But they will cripple a Ray Tracer. If Sun could optimize Java better it might be viable but for now Ray Tracing based games would have to be written at a lower level even with a small resolution.

Maybe people don't expect enough out of handhelds to notice that the graphics are "poor" and that they could be better. In that case you could probably get away with Java. People don't expect much out of a console until someone starts really pushing the limit and then everyone has to.

Bunnies, http://www.dawnofthegeeks.com/ (a Wolf3D clone) was originally written in Java. I then started translating it to C# and got about a 50% speed boost. I'm now able to do bump mapping, higher resolutions and still have playable framerates.

And this is just for Ray Casting which is much simpler than Ray Tracing.

During my development with Java I discovered that setting a pixel color to 0xFF000000 caused a slowdown. That's right, a black pixel would slow the framerate down. I had to set all pure black pixels to not quite black pixels.

http://www.dawnofthegeeks.com/index.php?page=blog&offset=58

I also found that Java is much slower at doing a "v++" than C.

Those quirks aren't a big deal when you're not trying to do a lot of math. But they will cripple a Ray Tracer. If Sun could optimize Java better it might be viable but for now Ray Tracing based games would have to be written at a lower level even with a small resolution.

Maybe people don't expect enough out of handhelds to notice that the graphics are "poor" and that they could be better. In that case you could probably get away with Java. People don't expect much out of a console until someone starts really pushing the limit and then everyone has to.

Bunnies http://bunnies.dawnofthegeeks.com/index.php?a=main&s=media& has been my pet project for awhile now and I've been using Safari on Windows to be able to edit large maps. It uses a lot of javascript/ajax to create a point and click interface to create maps. On IE7 it takes several seconds between clicking on a cell and the tile being placed. FireFox is a bit faster. Safari I think is the fastest. FF Beta 2 is pretty quick.

JavaScript is being used so much around the web now that it needs to be a focus for browser makers. It doesn't matter how fast you get the content to your user, if you use a lot of JS your site could appear to be slow and non-responsive.

Cubia is a lightweight Wikipedia mirror running on a $7 GoDaddy account along with a bunch of other sites. I'm still importing the articles (2-3 million of 4.5 are already there) but it should be done today.

Until your project maxes out 1000GB of transfer per month and/or 100GB of space there's no reason to pay more than $7 a month to run your new project. I'm amazed at the ignorance that prompts people to waste 10's of thousands of dollars on equipment they won't possibly have a need for, for years. Meanwhile that money could be sitting in a high yeild savings account collecting interest and the interest alone could cover all the hosting costs needed while the project gets started.

Cubia will allow for user submitted content later this week. The first step was getting all the articles loaded up.

If Wikipedia fails it's because of stupidity. No one should ever develop software on a top of the line system. Especially web apps. It needs to be designed on old and busted systems to ensure that it is highly efficient to reduce costs. Cubia was started on a PIII 900Mhz system and it runs like a champ. MediaWiki (which is used by Wikipedia) is completely unusable on the same system. And that's why they spend so much money on servers.

Meanwhile, I'm mirroring it on a $7 GoDaddy account.

MediaWiki is a slow lumbering beast. I ran a wikipedia mirror with MediaWiki on a PIII 900 and it was virtually unusable. Just doing a simple redirect to the new server took seconds before I cut out the wiki initialization stuff that was happening prior to the 301 redirect.

Cubia is a lightweight wikipedia mirror hosted on a GoDaddy account. The pages are all split up between 256 tables using the first 2 characters of the md5 encoding of the page title to decide which table the page goes into.

Cubia on the PIII 900 is very responsive.

When costs go up generally it's a good idea to reconsider what your software is doing that requires so many resources. The whole wikipedia thing could probably be greatly simplified to cut down on bandwidth and computing power required if they just dumped MediaWiki and went with a custom streamlined front end.