Ever since the Wii crossed our threshold, I’ve been fascinated by it. But I’ve kept away… I’m not entirely happy with the potential interaction between WiiMotes and ICDs. Nevertheless, just watching people young and old playing on the Wii, from sports to fitness to education, I felt there was something about the interaction that would have an enterprise payoff. [In the past, I’ve had a similar feeling about EyeToy, but it only went as far as considering its use as an icebreaker at offsite meetings.]
Today, thanks to a tweet from PRGeek, I went and took a look at this video. Head tracking for desktop VR displays using a WiiMote.
We’re not talking games any more. More and more, we will see enterprises spend real money on usability, on visualisation tools, on ways to support people who would otherwise be disenfranchised.
Incidentally, thanks to a tweet from LifeKludger, I went and took a look at this. Pointui. Providing “touch” features …. when you don’t have a finger….
We’re going to see a lot more of this; opportunities for us to take “consumer” tools and transform them, mutate them, into things the enterprise can use. But not every enterprise will be able to use them; we will need to understand a lot more about open architectures and reusable components before we get there; we will need to be much more agnostic about devices and platforms before we get there; and we will need to have understood the importance of enfranchising an army of people currently sidelined by our incompetence.
JP,
You may want to have a look at the stuff that Ed and Dan, who are on an SAP Fellowship, built.
http://blog.ewherrmann.com/2007/10/08/majority-desk-get-your-wiihands-on/
I’m also very interested in accessibility issues. I recently gave a talk about accessibility, law and social software at a computer law conference. I’d be happy to share slides etc with you.
Technologies can build bridges, but they do walls equally well.
Jonny Chung Lee does some more great stuff with wii remotes at :
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/projects/wii/