For those of you who are generally lazy I'll try to get the choice bits:
97% reliable with gesture recognition? That's a pretty good feat considering:He wasn't talking idly. He said a system developed by a Vicarious colleague, Jesse Raymond, a few weeks ago has been crunching the data of dozens of players who have tested the game on the Wii, analyzing the results of requests for players to do 10 swipes in a row or 10 stabs in a row, recognizing which moves the current version of the game fails to recognize as the intended gesture, tweaking the code, checking the pool of data from the gesture trials again for any new misunderstandings, repeat and recode, again and again. The result? "Within a week it went from being 60 to 70 percent reliable to 97 percent reliable," Chrzanowski said.
Yep. They can recognise the gesture no matter how much expression you put into it."Early on I had, like, 20 gestures," Chrzanowski said. His bosses at Vicarious told him to tone things down because they didn't think people could remember all of that. Stripped down to a handful, the gestures were initially really big. To do something super you'd have to make a super-sized move.
"We had an extreme level of effort and you had to whip the controller like that," Chrzanowski said, making a big swing of his arm. "I went home and was like, 'Wow, my arm's stronger.' "
The point of the game, though, wasn't to deliver a workout. And so they made the game accommodate a broader range of moves.
"You can swing the controller around like a madman if you want to and get all immersed in it, or a basic flick of the wrist will get everything accomplished." The analog stick on the Wii's nunchuck attachment controls movement.
I must say after reading this article I'm a lot more confident about the Wii controller as well as being a lot more receptive to the nunchuck style. Hopefully most of the devs are going to put similar amounts of effort into accurate gesture recognition. With Nintendo's track record with assisting 3rd parties to enhance the gaming experience *cough*RSP microcode*cough* they might have to do it themselves.