[saturnine]

Wii Fit hacked to work with WOW

With Wii Fit's popularity making the game near-impossible to find and World of Warcraft's subscriber base nearing 11 million, it was just a matter of time before the two collided in some form. That form, as it turns out, is a project at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence which could augur the combination of real-world exercise and in-game raiding.

In a YouTube video creatively titled "User Interactions with the Wii Balance Board," grad students Matthieu Deru and Simon Bergweiler showed off how they hacked the peripheral to control movement inside World of Warcraft. According to the tech-blog Technabob, the pair connected the balance board to a PC running a special homebrew application which translated on-board motions into in-game movement via Bluetooth connection. For about a minute, they guided two characters on a brief stroll through Azeroth.

Whether by oversight or design, Deru and Bergweiler chose not to have players walk in place on the board, as some Wii Fit minigames do to often exhaustive effect. Instead, they change the characters' orientation by leaning forwards and backwards, and then lean forward or backwards for movement in those various directions.

I dunno, that doesn't look that special to me.