Tami Griffith of the Army Simulation Tech and Training Center is describing the use of current technology for training. Shows a video of interfacing a Wii and balance board with Second Life. Apparently a lot of people are hacking the Wii for things like this. She says that whole-body training is much more effective and memorable than joysticks or cockpit simulators.
Cool.
The best they can come up with is a Wii and Second Life? As far as electronic entertainment goes, the Wii is a toaster. And Second Life is a punchline for anyone who has spent even a little time immersed in online gaming and their attendant communities. The Army ought to be embarrassed.
On the other hand, a lot of people who aren’t in-tune with technology like this sort of default to the Wii and Second Life as some sort of iconic example of their respective categories, even though the former is almost exclusively a vehicle for lo-fi party games and exercise programs, and the latter is both a social and technological Charlie Foxtrot, because both of them get a lot of air-time and mentions in newspapers by journalists who don’t know any better.
Matt, if I were doing (or overseeing) the work, I’d definitely want to see them start with cheap, off-the-shelf commodity hardware. The goal here is understanding the best training techniques and designing robust algorithms for them. It’s a software and user-experience study problem, for the most part. Plugging in kick-ass hardware can and should be done as a final step. Plenty of otherwise promising projects founder by focussing too much too early on the sheer coolness of the implementation and lose track of the true goals.
One could hardly call the Wii fit an insignificant piece of technology. The device is surprisingly accurate in its sensing of body movement.
I remember when, as a kid, me and my friends would talk about how awesome it would be to have something resembling the Wii fit. Instead we would have to resort to standing on a milk crate and pretending with our imaginations — shocking, I know.