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So, by now everyone on the planet knows about the Wii. It’s Nintendo’s heralded return to the console scene, and if the NPD numbers have anything to say about it, Nintendo didn’t just conquer the current video game market, it created a new market for itself.
One of the Wii’s biggest and most important contributions to the interactive entertainment space is the controller, the “Wiimote” a motion sensitive controller that really changed the way people perceived video games. The “ooh, aah” appeal of the Wii was even more apparent when Nintendo unleashed Wii Fit. Wii Fit, is basically a set of mini games strung together with some rudimentary stat tracking – it’s nothing we haven’t seen before, but the perfect storm of Wii hype, an overweight America, and the appeal of Yoga somehow brough the Wii Fit and its balance board into the mainstream.
On the subject of the balance board, it’s a pretty simple concept – a device that measures your weight on a location-specific basis on the pad. With that information, you can do a lot of number crunching behind the scenes to create some neat results. For relatively cheap (well, at least cheap compared to some of the weighing systems you see employed at universities), you can have your own personal scale with four pressure points – using information from those four points, you can pretty much pinpoint the pressure and weight that you’re putting on any point of the board (you’ve got your coordinate plane right there!)
However, the remarkable hardware comes bundled with some pretty lame software. This can be fixed though, as a few simple changes in the exercise database, competitive tracking system, and social media functionality can turn this into a “Soccer Mom’s” toy to a serious fitness machine.
