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Submission + - The Wii's MEMS Inventor on Future Technology

Submitted by
eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: "IEEE Spectrum is running an artcile on the inventor of the motion sensor that the Wii uses. The microelectromechanical system (MEMS) gives Wii it's core ability to sense motion in the controller and, arguably, a distinct advantage over the competition. But what's really interesting is where Benedetto Vigna wants to take this technology: 'First he wants to make the sensor even smaller, even cheaper, even tougher. "I want it to fit in all kinds of places — shoes and textiles, for instance, where it might be useful for medical monitoring," he says. "Then I want to make a three-dimensional gyroscope, to measure rotation around three different axes. Today, such products are quite big, a cube 10 centimeters on a side. We want to do this in less than a 30-millimeter cube, to serve as an image stabilizer in cameras and to track a person's position in the intervals when he can't get a GPS signal." Better still, he adds, would be to throw in a magnetic detector, freeing the navigator from GPS altogether. It would be yet another marvel from Lilliput — the smallest compass ever sold.'"

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