Though it may be difficult to tell, the adjacent picture is not a live photograph of Shigeru Miyamoto -- it's just a caricature. At Nintendo's E3 2006 press conference, Miyamoto, Reggie Fils-Aime, and Satoru Iwata all played Wii tennis with cartoon versions of themselves.In an interview with CNN's Chris Morris, Nintendo legend Shigeru Miyamoto hinted that the average Wii owner may also be able to turn themselves into Anime Avatars: "we have some different ideas about how to take advantage of that functionality – and we will be sharing that type of functionality with third parties." Is it a software app, inherent to the Wii, or a special trick involving a Wii camera?
Microsoft showed us at E3 this year how to use its camera for face mapping, what if Nintendo had a camera that could do the same -- only, the Wii camera would turn us all into Japanese cartoons. This is all, of course, rampant speculation, but we wouldn't be surprised if Nintendo managed to placed a little camera inside its TV-mounted sensor.
[update1: Mike Sklens of Planet GameCube has sent us an interview his site did with Takashi Tezuka, who is overseeing Wii Sports. Tezuka confirms that there is software where players can "use some set images and match them up together to create faces" -- in other words, you're going to have to make your own caricatures.]
_thumbnail.jpg "i am 8-bit: 2008")
(Page 1) Reader Comments
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For further proof, I offer that both motion sensing in the nunchuk and the speaker in the remote are as big or bigger than both of the above possibilities and they barely made a ripple.
Guaranteed it will also have to do with gameplay, because the whole theme of the console is 'Playing = Believing". It holds to form that the final secret will be some sort of new gameplay function and certainly not a camera. Every Sony rep in the world would finally be able to say that Nintendo stole something from them. The camera would have to go under the radar. Even if they did have one for the Gameboy.
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Perhaps a GBA and/or NDS slot?
How about playing NDS games on screen while using the NDS as a wireless controller?
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The caricature system they mentioned is probably a wizard to create an online avatar, good idea. ( read Penny arcade for further reference on why letting a kid with a camera online is not very smart)
The Wii has an IR sensor not a video camera. (a lot less expensive)
If they had a secret to show they would have done it in the E3 theres no point at showing anything right now since most people wont even notice.
p.s. Does anyone have a release date and price on the Wii? the rumors mentioned $150 now there are all the way up to $300.
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wiiconnect24 will offer so much. read this: http://www.codenamerevolution.com/?p=635
+ then consider the opera browser,,its support for external USB hard-drives, etc.
the wii is going to be soooo great.
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My speculation would be that nintendo has spearheaded some kind of new input method using the Wiimote. Maybe some dodeahedron looking polygon with letters all around it, and you tilt your Wiimote to spin the polygon and select letters. Something Lawn Mowerman-esque. But a microphone would probably be much easier for people lol.
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I could see something like that happening but without a special slot on the Wii. The DS already knows how to write to flash memory in a game card and the DS already has online capability. All Nintendo needs to do is sell a DS flash card that meets their security concerns to make selling DS content online viable. Alternatively, SD cards, which the Wii does support, could be be accessed on the DS through an adaptor in the GBA slot. Nintendo already sells a GBA media player that uses SD cards, so much of the engineering has already been done.
Doing the shopping on the Wii would offer a more comfortable display but the same can be said for any PC. All that matters is that the DS can access the download via WiFi regardless of what device was used to register the purchase.
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It basically states that the Wii will (or, is rumored to) be much more powerful than the initial specs indicated.
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Nintendo has never revealed official specs, so these are as good as those from IGN in my opinion--both hearsay, and the IGN specs are not based on final hardware, either.
However, I fully expect final hardware to be approximately what Spong is reporting. Nintendo still won't make a big deal of it.
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I do not like the idea of on-line storage for purchased games. I'd prefer to keep them myself.
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