Technology Review has an AP story about these new controllers that is fascinating considering the shrinking size and cost of this technology.
From the AP article -
"When you wave around the new Nintendo controller, two tiny, flat pieces of silicon inside it, each weighing about a millionth of a gram, flex against silicon springs that hold them in place.
The movements are minute, or to put it another way, they're on the scale of 10 to 100 hydrogen atoms stacked side by side.
But these tiny movements can be measured with incredible accuracy. A charge is applied between the moving pieces of silicon and two nearby sensors. Faint fluctuations in that charge, as small as that of 10 electrons, are picked up by a chip that translates it into an understanding of how the controller is moving.
The two moving weights, which fit together on an area less than a millimeter square, have different roles. One has two sets of springs, which allow it to move from side to side and back and forth. The other weight is a flat piece anchored almost like trampoline. It senses vertical movement. This way, the chip can distinguish motion in all three dimensions of space.
The Nintendo Wii Remote one-ups the Sony controller by including an infrared camera. It picks up signals from a sensor bar the owner attaches to the television set. This enables the remote to ''know'' where it is in relation to the screen, so the player can use the controller to point to things on the screen -- a useful feature in shooting games (and a lot of games are shooting games).So where has this technology been until now?
Accelerometers have been used to guide missiles and aircraft, said Richard Marks, who worked on an underwater robot before his job as head of special projects at Sony Computer Entertainment America.
''We had a $25,000 inertial system that was probably comparable,'' to the one in the Sony controller, he said. ''These things have become so much less expensive.''
In the past, accelerometers were large mechanical devices, with springs or liquids that sensed orientation and movement. The reason they can go into game devices now is that they're made not by assembling mechanical components, but with the same techniques used to make computer chips."
