Gedanken Experiment - The Royal Wii

Last nigt, Wii played Nintendo Wii. Wii played Wii until the Wii hours of the morning. Wii paused only when one of us had to Wii.

No more puns. I promise.

Oh, and for those of you who read this blog looking for hilarity rather than science, I'm afraid that today's post is going to be somewhat deeper than what I'd previously intended to contemplate: How could Miss Congeniality have a sequel when the first movie wrapped things up so tidily?

So. The AngryMark, the Jenksicus, the SpikyHairWill, and the I got together at Jenks' apartment, where we played Wii on Jenks' giant flatscreen TV. Sidebar: it must be nice to have a job.

The game was Red Steel. It works like this: Run around and throw grenades at / shoot each other. Pretty standard stuff, really, for my generation. Nothing says 20-something-year-old friendship like a grenade to the face.

For those who haven't played Wii because they don't have wealthy friends off of whom to mooch (the word "mooch" just doesn't work with proper English), the controllers are a quantum leap away from tradition. Rather than adjust your orientation using one of two joysticks on the controller, it is the orientation of the controller itself that determines your aim. It is a remarkably simple control scheme, in essence the equivalent of the Duck Hunt controller, if the Duck Hunt controller had one extra degree of freedom, 3 more buttons, a digital joystick, and triorthogonal accelerometry. And if you could attach a second joystick/accelerometer/button combo controller for the left hand to use.
Pay no attention to the ridiculous tan line
This sounds really complicated, but in reality once you're playing the game, it's very intuitive. Your left hand controls your legs, and your right hand aims the gun. Other functions are so secondary as to be negligible until you've developed some fluency.

Watch your feet, kids, 'cause I'm about to drop some knowledge.

Whether they intended to or not, the developers at Nintendo did a brilliant job with this controller. It's logical enough to design a control scheme based on real-life tasks like aiming. However, the ancillary control, like with the left-hand's controller (aka'ed as the Nunchuk), couldn't have been nearly as obvious. Yet the results are almost perfectly in line with human neurophysiology.

Consider the task of reaching. You see a target, you reach the arm for that target, you come reasonably close to that target. There will be some small but measurable error, and the nature of that error is very telling. The Kinesiology Lab at Penn State published a paper about this sort of thing.

They found that the left hand and the right hand make different types of errors, even though their magnitudes are pretty much the same. Specifically, your right hand's error will be in the trajectory and final position, and your left hand's error will be in the velocity and timing - implying that your right hand is better at velocity, and your left is better at position.

This makes sense... you thread the needle by holding the needle steady in the left hand and moving the thread with the right hand.

So when it comes to controlling the act of shooting your friend with a shotgun on the patio of some anonymous restaurant, you want your left hand performing a steady-state task, and you want your right hand performing the dynamic task. Well done, Nintendo.
Will and Charlie demonstrate

With this Neurophysiology-Wii relationship in mind, there are a lot more experiments that could be designed to tease out control-related schema from otherwise convoluted tasks. For example, what if we gave the Right-hand controller to one person and the Left-hand controller to another? How difficult will it be for them to perform tasks, to coordinate, to strafe and progress and look around. There are so many ways to combine tasks, quantifiable performance measures, control conditions, and so on... someone please give me a grant with which to buy a few Wiis and some lab space. Please.

I'm certainly not the first person to think about this sort of thing. The advent of virtual reality has raised a lot of questions about interaction in a virtual environment. For example, SCIENCE!!! I'm just probably the first person to propose it for completely selfish reasons. Please buy me a Wii, NIH.
Jenks and Will each take a controller
What if we give them two simultaneous coordination tasks?