12-27-2006, 09:00 PM
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Contributing Editor Emeritus
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 2,291
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Digital Media Aspects of the Wii Channels
Unless you have been under a rock, you know what the Wii is about. There have been tons of news stories and reviews about the Wii, so if you are looking to read about the Wii as a gaming machine this is not the article for you. I will say the Wii is pure fun. In this article, I am going to provide a glimpse of some of the other features of the Wii that have not been covered in a great deal of depth. Specifically, I am going to take a look at the Wii Internet, Photo, and Weather channels.
Let me start with a disclaimer. The Wii looks much better in real life than these screen captures give credit for. Normally I use the component video cables to connect to my 65' HDTV. With that setup, the web pages shown below are readable without zooming and are extremely clear with a bit of zoom. As I had no way to capture HD or even capture video directly from the Wii, I used the composite cables to connect to my DVR and recorded the video stream which I then burned to DVD and then used to performed screen captures on my PC.
First off is a capture showing how the Digital Media Thoughts homepage looks on the Wii browser.
Navigation is really simple and intuitive and uses just the Wiimote. I've seen some posts in the Opera forums asking that the nunchuck attachment be supported in the browser. While this might be nice as an advanced option, as basic controls go, the control interface is pretty well thought out. Here are the basics of Wii broswer navigation.
The Wii browser was written by Opera. I visited a number of sites and had no browser issues. Things like Google Maps and YouTube worked great. (It is really cool and great for parties to be able to watch videos on the big screen.) The initial version of the browser was released on 12/22/2006 and was labeled as a trial version. The final version is not due for four months. There are certainly some areas for improvement, but the core browser works well and with four months until the final release, the final product should be great. Some of the current issues include the navigation bar and the black borders around the screen being too big, favorites are cumbersome, there is an issue with the back button not always working properly. Broader audio/video format and support for versions of flash beyond 7.0 would be nice. A physical keyboard would be cool, but the on screen keyboard works pretty well.
Next up is the Wii Photo Channel.
The Wii has an SD card slot. You can pop a card from your digital camera directly into the Wii and have some fun with the picture.
All your pictures show up in a nice browser format. From within the browser, you have the ability to open the picture up in a paint-like program and make some changes. While this is not a photo-editing program, it is something that might be fun for the kids to play with.
The neatest feature though is the slide show. I expected this to be your standard slide show, which is one of the options, but the Wii slide show can optionally do some classy fades involving slight pans and zooms of your photos giving just enough motion to make it interesting. The Wii will also play either built-in music selections or any music you included in MP3 format on the SD card.
The slide shows look really slick. I used it to create a few impromptu Christmas gifts by pumping the output into my DVR and burning DVD's of the slide shows.
Finally, the weather channel will give you the forecast for your hometown or any other place on the planet. While it sounds simple, there are a few cute touches that make it neat. For example, if the forecast is for rain, the background sound changes to the sound of a rainstorm.
Also cool is a world view of the weather. You can grab the earth with your Wiimote and spin it around. It feels a lot like the interface of Google Earth.
I'd like to see Nintendo add a music channel to the Wii. Ideally, you could play music from your SD card, a USB connected device, a CD or DVD, or via web radio stations.
Chris Gohlke is a Contributing Editor for Digital Media Thoughts. He loves Sci-Fi and loves to get his hands on real-life tech gadgets. He lives in Tallahassee, Florida, USA with his wife and three cats.
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