From Swordplay to Cooking: Wii Dev Made Easy

October 12th, 2006, 17:59 Posted By: wraggster

Nintendo and AiLive have unveiled the development kit behind Wiimote motion capture for gameplay. While the news is a bit inside baseball it is pretty fascinating how easy Nintendo is making it to program games for that use their Wiimote's special functions.

AiLive LiveMove essentially lets you capture Wiimote motions in real-time and instantly attatch them to a function in your game.

"In early 2006, I challenged Dr. Wei Yen and his AI scientists to develop AIware for the Wii Remote. When Nintendo's development teams saw LiveMove, we instantly recognized how it would greatly increase our ability to explore and experiment with new concepts and make our lives easier," says Genyo Takeda, Senior Managing Director/General Manager of Integrated Research & Development Division, Nintendo Co., Ltd. "This revolutionary tool liberates the imaginations of game creators. We are more than happy to share this collaborative LiveMove tool with independent Wii software developers all over the world. From a cowboy's lasso to a samurai's sword or a chef's cooking utensils, we just can't wait to play the developers' new, 'unexpected' applications."
One of the examples the website offers is for a team making a zombie cowboy game. Instead of forcing a programmer to waste all of their time programming and testing out different motions on the Wiimote for gameplay, some non-programming creative lump can sit in his or her office swinging the controller about until he finds the moves he likes. Then it's just a matter of ringing up programmers and saying "All done," apparently the kit does the capture and most of the heavy lifting.

It's genius that Nintendo recognized the importance of streamlining development for the more unusual aspects of the Wii. It will get that many more developers to think about creating games for their console using the special features. And, according to the release, the kit costs only $2,500 per seat. Cheap!

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