The Mossberg Solution » remote control

Playing With a More Sensitive Wii

Katherine Boehret — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 22:18:02 +0000

Nintendo’s Wii gaming system motivates first-graders, senior citizens and everyone in between to get off their couches and play video games by swinging a motion-sensing remote control. These motions are similar enough to those used in real-life games that people find the Wii less intimidating than other video games with confusing controls.

After almost three years of Wii success, Nintendo recently reported it sold in its first quarter less than half the Wii consoles it sold a year earlier. The Wii needs a shot in the arm, and Nintendo thinks it has just the solution: the Wii MotionPlus remote accessory.

[ See post to watch video ]

This small piece plugs into the bottom of Wii remotes and costs $20 by itself or $50 when bundled with the Wii Sports Resort game, which includes 12 sports that take advantage of Wii MotionPlus. The Wii console costs $250 and comes with a remote and a Nunchuk. The Wii MotionPlus has a gyroscope that helps the remote detect slight twists or rotations made by one’s wrist and/or arm and reflects these movements on the screen. It adds more precision to games like bowling and golf, so you don’t feel like you accidentally made a good—or bad—shot. And it lets you add spin to a ball while swinging a golf club or ping-pong racket or while bowling.

I’ve been playing games with the Wii MotionPlus, and this small accessory adds a much more satisfying, realistic element to Wii games. In some cases, this meant that I played a game with less success than with the original Wii remote because the MotionPlus add-on is more responsive and sensitive. But I eventually got used to it and liked it more than the plain remote.

However enjoyable, the Wii MotionPlus is more of an evolutionary change than a revolutionary change. If you’ve never played video games on a Wii before, you wouldn’t know what you were missing if you used the remote without MotionPlus.

The real excitement in video gaming and general broadcast TV controlling will come when we don’t need any remote controls at all and cameras will sense our movements, reflecting them on-screen. In June, Microsoft (MSFT) announced its Project Natal, which would potentially work with all Xbox 360 consoles to directly sense movements and sounds, and to recognize faces. This would encourage users to swing, throw, run and jump in a completely natural way without the need to learn anything about how to hold a remote control or operate its buttons.

On a similar note, Sunnyvale-Calif.-based Canesta Inc. wants you to use your hands as remote controls for your TV. The idea with Canesta is that users could, for example, walk into a family room and wave at the TV to turn it on, move a hand in a rightward circle to turn up the volume and flip through channels using motions like those used to page through a large book. I tried Canesta in a demonstration and can testify that doing things like turning the channel with your hands is a powerful and somewhat magical experience. But of these, Nintendo currently has the only product on the market to use technology that echoes natural movements, albeit with a remote control. Project Natal is still just a research project that isn’t used in any products, and it won’t be coming out any time this year.

[ See post to watch video ]

Canesta has a partnership with Hitachi (HIT) so that it will be used in the company’s TV sets, though Hitachi says these TVs won’t be available until 2010 at the earliest and would likely show up in Japan first. Canesta is also building other partnerships, or it could work as a standalone product for TVs, computers, set-top boxes or other devices.

Wii MotionPlus makes the remote smart enough not to require as much button pressing. For example, shooting basketballs in a three-point shootout only required holding the remote in my right hand so it followed my shooting motion. Bowling no longer requires letting go of a button just in time to release the ball, a former menace to Wii’s beginner bowlers. And I threw a Frisbee by moving the remote with the same motion as if I were tossing one in real life. At first, my friend and I found ourselves trying to make stiff motions that seemed more video-game-like, but when the on-screen instructions encouraged us to move naturally, we did so and had much more success.

Wii Sports Resort includes 12 different sports but omits some of the old favorites from the original Wii Sports. Tennis has been replaced with table tennis, boxing has been replaced by sword fighting, and though bowling and golf remain, baseball is gone. New sports include wakeboarding, Frisbee, archery, basketball, power cruising (jet skis), canoeing, cycling and air sports like parachuting.

I bowled and put a little extra spin on the ball by twisting my wrist just before letting go. The ball was surprisingly reactive, so much so that I had to tone down my spin before I got the hang of it. Wakeboarding works by holding the remote horizontally like it’s the cross bar you hold onto and use for steering in the water. The Wii MotionPlus works with the Nunchuk attachment, and my friend and I attached this piece to the remote to compete against one another in several rounds of archery (he won by seven points). With the Nunchuk attached to the remote, we held the remote like it was the bow and slowly pulled the Nunchuk attachment back as if it were the arrow—stretching sound-effects and all.

The MotionPlus can stay attached to the remote while playing games that aren’t made specifically for its use; those games won’t be affected. However, a regular remote can’t be used with games made for the MotionPlus. Along with Wii Sports Resort, three other games are made to use the Wii MotionPlus: Sega’s Virtua Tennis 2009, EA Sports’ (ERTS) Grand Slam Tennis and Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10.

If you’re hoping to give your tired Wii a boost, you’ll like what the relatively inexpensive Wii MotionPlus accessory brings to your game—though you’ll also need to buy new games that work with it. Generally speaking, it’s exciting to know that technology is almost advanced enough that we could very soon stop letting our remotes have all the control and take some of it back with just the wave of a hand.

Email mossbergsolution@wsj.com

Yahoo Widgets Lend Brains to Boob Tube

Katherine Boehret — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 23:30:03 +0000

Your television set may be the most expensive, eye-catching piece of electronic equipment in your home, but compared to a computer with Internet access, it’s just a dumb box. With their low-tech IQs, TVs encourage a lot of family-room multitasking: While watching the big screen TV, lots of people are looking away to surf the Web with the computer on their lap or the mobile device in their hand.

But television manufacturers are sick and tired of sharing your attention with another device. So this week, Samsung Electronics introduced a television with truly integrated Internet smarts: the $3,000 Samsung LED TV 7000 with the Yahoo Widget Engine. It lets people watch TV and access the Web on the same big screen at the same time, with special on-screen applications that appear on a strip at the bottom of the screen and fetch online content. By this summer, Sony (SNE) and LG Electronics also will offer TVs with the Yahoo Widget Engine, and Vizio will offer models soon thereafter.

[ See post to watch video ]

I’ve been testing the Yahoo Widget Engine on a 46-inch Samsung TV, and I found it to be a lot of fun to use. It’s easy to navigate, thanks to special color-coded shortcuts on the TV’s remote control, and I didn’t have to abandon the show I was watching to look up a few things online. Widgets, which are small, easily downloadable computer applications, typically expand to a semitranslucent, overlaying panel on the left, or your program can be resized so you don’t lose any of the picture. The one major downside was that it uses a virtual keyboard rather than a physical keyboard for text entry. (You use the remote control to select text from an on-screen keyboard.) A good keyboard is essential for social networking widgets like Twitter, allowing quickly typed reactions to shows as you’re watching them. Samsung is planning to introduce a remote-control-based input method for next-generation TVs.

Samsung’s LED TV 7000 uses the Yahoo Widget Engine to access Web content, like Flickr.

If you’re reading this and thinking that Internet on the TV has been tried before with limited success, you’re right. For years, companies have designed external boxes that bring some form of the Web to your TV. These include Microsoft Corp.’s (MSFT) Xbox, Apple Inc.’s (AAPL) Apple TV and some features of TiVo (TIVO). But the Yahoo Widget Engine differs from these boxes in two ways. First, Yahoo’s widget system works simultaneously with your TV programming, so you don’t have to turn off the college basketball game to pull up a news story about a star player. Second, it will include widgets with video content that directly competes with live programming.

This second point is noteworthy because television manufacturers in the past have quashed applications with Web video content for fear of these programs competing with live shows. Yahoo (YHOO) says it won’t block widgets from its Widget Engine, so you could, say, run a Showtime widget that plays an episode of “The Tudors” instead of watching a live show.

The Yahoo Widget Engine comes preloaded on TVs with four basic widgets to start: Flickr (Yahoo’s photo service), Yahoo News, Weather and Finance. When prompted, these widgets appear in a horizontal dock along the bottom edge of the TV screen, along with Widget Gallery and Profile. (If you just want to watch TV, you can hide the widget dock easily.) Yahoo expects to offer 20 to 30 widgets within two months, and estimates that it will offer around 100 by the end of the year.

Samsung lent me an LED TV 7000 loaded with the four basic widgets and some extras that will be available in the Widget Gallery by early April: Twitter, Yahoo Video, USA Today Sports and three games (Sudoku, Texas Hold’em and QuizzMaster).

The Yahoo Widget Engine follows a model that encourages developers — even Yahoo’s competitors — to make widgets for its store-like Widget Gallery, where they will be available to download free directly on the TV. The system is similar to Apple’s highly successful App Store for the iPhone, and, like iPhone apps, these widgets will take seconds to download and are fun to try. The Yahoo widgets will work across all enabled televisions, regardless of manufacturer.

Yahoo Widget Engine displays tidbits of information on a TV, like news and weather, without interrupting programming.

Samsung and Yahoo each have their own sub-stores of widgets within Widget Gallery. But users most likely won’t know or care which widgets are coming from what source because they’re all grouped into categories like Latest Widgets, Community and Messaging. Other TV manufacturers will be able to follow this model with their own stores, as well.

The Samsung LED TV 7000 connects to the Web via a wired connection or by using a wireless USB device, which Samsung sells for $80. Currently, Samsung offers four models with built-in Web access, which it calls Internet@TV. By June, the company plans to offer a total of 17 models with Internet@TV. All TVs with the Widget Engine will have remote-control shortcut buttons to pull up widgets.

With a local news station on in the background, I used the Yahoo Widget Engine to pull up Flickr in a left-side panel. After using the painfully slow virtual keyboard to sign into my Flickr account, I quickly skimmed through categories like Your Photos, Your Groups and Explore. I browsed photos from one of my Flickr groups, both in the side panel only and in full-screen slideshow mode, and tagging favorites with a yellow button on my remote control.

With a few steps, snippets of information, or shortcuts, can be created for certain widgets, like Yahoo Weather and Finance, to save you from opening the widget to see more details in a left-side panel. I created a Yahoo Finance snippet for McDonald’s (MCD) stock so I could see this stock’s status at the bottom of my screen without opening the Finance widget. People who have Yahoo accounts can synchronize their account settings with the TV, such as stocks saved in Yahoo Finance.

The Twitter widget automatically refreshes its content roughly once a minute, so you can see new tweets (updates) from the people you follow right in the horizontal dock. You also can see a list of the most popular phrases on Twitter, search Twitter and save searches.

Individual Widget Engine profiles can be created for up to eight people so that a 16-year-old doesn’t have to see his dad’s stock-market news in his profile. Widgets can be moved around in the horizontal dock so you can line them up according to your personal preferences.

The Yahoo Widget Engine is still in its early stages, and there are plenty of changes and widgets to come, not to mention televisions from manufacturers other than Samsung. But it’s easy to navigate and its remote-controls buttons — especially those with color coding — bring the Internet to your TV screen with just one click. If you want a smarter TV, the Yahoo Widget Engine will do the trick.

Edited By Walter S. Mossberg

Email us at mossbergsolution@wsj.com. Find this and other columns and videos online free at the All Things Digital Web site: http://solution.allthingsd.com

Family Snapshots in the Splendor of HD

Katherine Boehret — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 01:28:02 +0000

This Thanksgiving, families across the country will gather around the television just as quickly as they gather around the turkey. And with good reason: Many people will be staring at beautiful high-definition TV sets. (According to the Consumer Electronics Association, 47% of U.S. households had HDTVs as of July, a percentage that’s likely to increase as the date for analog-to-digital conversion approaches.) But if Eastman Kodak (EK) has its way, many people will be gathered round the TV this holiday season, gazing at family memories in full HD splendor.

The Kodak Theatre HD Player’s motion-sensing pointer remote works much like a mouse on a TV screen.

This week I tested the Kodak Theatre HD Player, the photo-centric company’s attempt to snag valuable real estate in the living room. This small, black box pulls photos and videos from computers around the house and displays them on an HDTV. It also enables the sending and receiving of photos via Kodak Gallery, and connects to Web-based photos stored on Flickr, Facebook, Picasa, .Mac and others. Podcasts, Internet Radio and updates from news feeds, weather forecasts and stock quotes are also accessible using the HD Player. And it has a terrifically simple motion-sensing remote that works like using a mouse on a TV screen.

But the HD Player isn’t all smiles. Its $299 price doesn’t include any built-in storage for keeping content directly on the device. It currently has no way of accessing HD movies or television shows, nor will it work with Macs. In comparison, Apple’s (AAPL) $229 Apple TV has 40 gigabytes of storage, can access HD television shows and movies via the iTunes Store, and works with Macs and Windows PCs. This is important because as budgets tighten in the current economy, gadgets have to prove their value and versatility more than ever.

After using the Kodak Theatre HD Player with Windows XP and Vista machines over the past week, I can conclude that this device’s interface shines in its simplicity and is a lot of fun to use. Kodak teamed with Hillcrest Labs to make the player’s motion-sensitive remote and corresponding software, which includes satisfying extra features like images that automatically magnify when the remote control’s cursor points at them and icons that make chirping sounds when selected. The remote itself is shaped to rest comfortably in a hand and has three simple buttons and a scroll wheel.

Quick-access memory-card slots for six types of memory cards appear on the box’s front, and two USB ports can connect to digital cameras or USB storage devices.

Currently, the player’s software works directly with Flickr, RadioTime (8,750 radio stations) and FrameChannel, which grants access to various “channels” like Facebook, .Mac, Picasa, People.com news and National Geographic. Kodak says it will incorporate YouTube access in January; I got a sneak peek at the interface for this and it looks well-organized.

Yet the HD Player’s smart combination of software and remote left me wishing it did a bit more. Photo sharing is enabled only via Kodak Gallery, so you can’t use another Web-based account to share photos directly from your TV. Likewise, a blue light on the box slowly blinks only when new Picture Mail (a message containing shared photos) is received on a Kodak Gallery account, not when new photos are added on other sources such as Flickr Photostreams or Facebook pages.

The Home screen of the HD Player shows four categories: Pictures & Videos, Kodak Gallery, Music and Entertainment. Subcategories are where you might guess they would be, for example podcasts are listed under Entertainment. And a tiny Home icon appears in the top right corner of every screen so you can always get Home with one click. The Pictures & Videos category holds photos and videos from a currently selected Windows PC.

An unlimited number of Windows PCs can wirelessly pair with the player as long as they have special Kodak software installed on them. But only one PC’s content can be accessed at a time. I toggled between two paired computers without a problem, but would’ve preferred accessing music and photos from both sources simultaneously.

The HD Player’s motion-sensing pointer remote works much like a Wii remote control. Wherever you move it, a tiny leaf-shaped cursor appears on-screen. A Hide button on the remote will hide the cursor while you watch slideshows. The remote’s Back button is helpful; when pressed, it backs you out of one screen using visual effects that make the screen shrink into the TV as if you were moving backward.

A play button appears on the first photo in a folder so users can select this icon to quickly start slideshows. Whenever the HD Player receives new Kodak Gallery Picture Mail, or a slideshow is created on a connected PC, yellow alert circles appear on the screen to notify users and a number in the middle of these yellow circles indicates how many new items are available for viewing.

Some content on my PCs took a little while to be recognized by the HD Player, including podcasts that I subscribe to on iTunes. When they did show up, both audio and video podcasts played without issue and on-screen playback buttons made them easy to control.

The HD Player uses your photos to create automatically generated slideshows, called Picture Chronicles, once a week. These Picture Chronicles use up to 50 photos from the same time of year in all of your folders, for instance grouping all Thanksgiving photos together from the past five years.

Kodak has plans to make its player Mac-compatible in the future and also hopes to add other partnerships with new types of content following its YouTube announcement early next year.

The Kodak Theatre HD Player does its job well, bringing photos and videos that might otherwise live only on your PC to your big screen HDTV. For the holidays, this device could be a real plus. But Kodak has some work to do to make this a more useful Web-connected tool.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Email us at mossbergsolution@wsj.com. Find this and other columns and videos online free at the All Things Digital Web site: http://walt.allthingsd.com