More information on Mii's.

[~J~]

Sounds prrety damn cool, although I don't fancy having a Psymonkmii popping up when I'm trying to play FarCry (although wouldn't mind it in boxing).

•The Mii characters do not always feature as the main characters in the games. You can also find them popping up as faces in the crowd. For instance, in Wii Sports, a Mii you made a while ago and had forgotten about might turn up one day in the spectators' seats. - Hisashi Nogami

•To put it simply, Mii Parade is a system that uses the network to allow Mii characters created by many people to mix and mingle. You can line up Mii characters in the "Mii Plaza", but at the start the only Mii characters you will find are those you have created yourself. Over time, however, using the WiiConnect24 system, other users' Mii characters can come and visit. In the same way, your Mii can make an appearance on someone else's Wii, although this won't happen unless the user has authorised it. The user can choose whether or not to allow their Mii to come and go on the network, so the only Mii characters that will appear on someone else's Wii are those where the user has permitted it. - Hisashi Nogami

•You could have a Mii which has come from the other side of the world! -Satoru Iwata
•You could. Your Mii can pop up anywhere. I should point out though, that your Mii will never go missing from your own Wii. - Hisashi Nogami

http://play-nintendo.com/news/06100303.html

 

[~J~]

A few pictures of the packaging inside the box.

Note, these are production photos.

Nunchuck
http://gonintendo.com/wp-content/photos/002.JPG

Sensor bar
http://gonintendo.com/wp-content/photos/003.JPG

Power supply*
http://gonintendo.com/wp-content/photos/004.JPG

Composite cable**
http://gonintendo.com/wp-content/photos/005.JPG

Resting box
http://gonintendo.com/wp-content/photos/006.JPG


* nice size?

** Note how the Wii A/V connector isn't attached yet. And again, to confirm, it's a COMPOSITE cable.

 

[~J~]

I'm not sure I like the idea of sticking that sensor on my TV, be interested in seeing one in situ somewhere. Also, do we know if there's some kind of required distance/angle to be at? With the shape of my room and the layout, I'm going to be playing from a slight angle and fairly low in relation to the bar.

Absolutly not a problem at all.

The sensor bar can be position anywhere, so can be placed at the bottom of the tv, at the side, top, bottom, even behind. The system works by getting the position of the Wiimote and working out its position in 3d space. Distance wise IIRC it's about 40 feet from the sensor.

 

[~J~]

It's got to have line of sight though I assume?

Well, taken from the technical docs, here's what it says...

B. Sensor bar.
The triaxial accelerometers are highly accurate, but they only know how much and in what direction they have moved, not where they are, which would require the developer to find some way of getting the user to tell the device where it is,(Calibration) for more intricate interaction.
The sensor bar, uses a set of eight LED's (much to my surprise, apparently, Jim Merrick didn't quite understand how the sensor bar worked when he let his mouth run in an IGN article. "Uses blue tooth to trilaterate position", oh well, Public representatives aren't engineers, and these things happen).

Now, these IR LED's are picked up by an optical sensor at the end of the Wii remote. This is used to determine the distance to the remote. This information alone is more or less useless, but combined with the information in the remote, (angle) the Wii can establish an angle, and a distance, from the remote, to the led. That is eight points, with 8 distances. But accurate trilateration requires the known points not be in a single plane, or line. But this is the beauty of the sensor bar accelerometer combo.

If you have a line, and you know the angle, and distance of the line, you can intersect that line with a generated perpendicular line, of any assigned length. This would create a right triangle, the vertex being the end of the generated line, and having 2 known sides, the unknown side being the hypotenuse. A^2+b^2=c^2. We now have a distance to the generated point. This process can be duplicated an infinite amount of times (most probably well over 30 times a second.), as long as the Wii remote sensor can see the led. All those generated points can practically be described as, well, a field of points. Making accurate trilateration pretty easy, as long as one led from each side isn't blocked from view. Fortunately, even with the sensor bar hidden from view, all a developer needs to do is feed the last acquired co-ordinates to the accelerometers, this should provide more than accurate compensation until the line of sight is restored. Nintendo's E3 sensor bar was huge, and as a result, the remote would have trouble acquiring input from the sensor bar. in order to acquire distance, the Wii remote would have to be far enough away to acquire an led on each side, or point the remote at the sensor bar. As everyone has seen, Nintendo has seriously shrunk the size of the sensor bar since.

 

[~J~]

George Harrison, NOA's Senior VP of Marketing and Corporate Communication, recently chatten with Reuters, and gave away a few new details on Miis.


•The gathering place of the Miis (where you can see all of them) is called the Mii Plaza.

•Mii Plaza can hold up to 100 of your Mii creations.

•Additionally, 10 more can be stored in each Wiimote. Or for those of us not planning on making 110 Miis, it can be where you put your favorites, so you can take them and show them off at friends' homes.

•Don't want to save them to your Wiimote, but want them to be on hand at a friend's house when you go? You're in luck, because you can just pick them up and drop them into a message to a friend, and send them trough the Message Board.

•You also use the pick up and drop feature (using the Wiimote) to put Miis into games like Wii Sports, where they can replace the preprogrammed characters, like those in the crowds or even the main character(s).

•And finally, he expects Miis to bridge the generation gap between parents and children, where children can make a Mii of one of their parents, potentially interesting them enough to bring them to playing. •While there are currently only two games, to his knowledge, that will use Miis, he expects more to be released in 2007 from both Nintendo and third parties.

http://www.play-nintendo.com/news/06101703.html

Just gets better and better.

 

[~J~]

You can save them too your wiimote! Thats cool for multiplayer round a mates. Can you save games to the wiimotes too?

I *think* I've read somewhere that you can save a save-game or statistics, but that might have been sepculation in the early days. Would be nice though.

 

[~J~]

The cast of Lost:

http://geocities.com/rennster11/MiiLostCast.JPG