How the Wiimote Works

The New York Times' 'How it Works' series touches on a remote with a twist: the Nintendo Wiimote. The article describes the micron-sized machines that make it work, displays cut-away graphics of the little white marvel, and rounds out the discussion with a breakdown of where the tech came from. From the article: "The controller's most-talked-about feature is the capacity to track its own relative motion. This enables players to do things like steer a car by twisting the remote in the air or moving a game character by tilting the remote down or up. 'This represents a fabulous example of the consumerization of MEMS,' the tiny devices known as micro-electro-mechanical systems, said Benedetto Vigna, general manager of the MEMS unit at STMicroelectronics, a leading maker of the accelerometers embedded in the controllers. (Nintendo itself declined to talk about the controllers' inner workings.) He said the motion sensors, using the technology that activates vehicle air bags, can accurately sense three axes of acceleration: up and down, left to right, and forward and backward."

Comments

But you could

[everphilski]

but you could define three orthornormal axes for the accelerometer and three orthornomal axes for the gyroscope, which would be ... wait for it... sixaxis. We do this all the time in the aerospace world because you don't always mount the accelerometer and the gyroscope in the same manner. Each set of axes can be defined by a 3D vector and related by a 3x3 matrix.