Wii hack shows what Wii Music might have been

Devin Coldewey

Devin Coldewey is a Seattle-based writer and photographer. He has written for the TechCrunch network since 2007. Some posts he’d like you to read: The Dangers of Externalizing Knowledge | Generation i | Surveillant Society | Choose Two | Frame Wars | The User’s Manifesto | Our Great Sin His personal website is coldewey.cc. → Learn More

Tuesday, April 27th, 2010

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Look, we all know Wii Music was nonsense. And it wasn’t that playing music on a Wii is a bad idea, it’s that you just pretend to play music. If they had given it the attention it deserved, they might have put something together like this Carnegie Mellon student Shu did. Using a few flex sensors and the buttons and accelerometer in a Nunchuk, he’s made a functioning air guitar that even a baby could play competently. I mean, like a blues baby or something, not just any baby.

I was impressed but skeptical until he started throwing chords in there — skip to three minutes in if you want to skip the technical stuff and see what it’s like in use. The industrial design could use a little polishing, but if you make those flex sensors a little more sensitive and work out some easier plucking mechanics, this could be pretty awesome.

[via Hack a Day]

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