Baseball (2004), Bowling (2004), Bass Fishing (2006), Tennis (2004)Â and Golf (2005)Â all with their own motion sensing gesture controllers. Then there is Eyehand (which looks a bit like Minority Report), Lifestyle Manager, the J Mat (2005)Â and Powerboxing. A lot of excellent, innovative stuff.
As you can see these considerably predate their Nintendo Wii equivalents.
They are proud of their innovation “In the eleven years since inception, SSD has remained faithful to its original founding spirit, and has consistently developed new products and new element technologies that possess both immediate as well as potential value.” And very ambitious: “We will also be expanding our reach into information, communications, healthcare, industry, and other business sectors worldwide.”
XaviX are based in Kusatsu Japan which is right next to Kyoto, where Nintendo is. So obviously Nintendo must be very aware indeed of XaviX, their products and their technology. It would be interesting to know if they pay license fees to Xavix to use these ideas. And looking at XaviX products might give us some very good clues as to what Nintendo will do next.
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um…just because the xavix release date is before the wii’s does not imply that the xavix concepts predate any wii concepts. for the record nintendo begins work on next gen consoles immediately following the release of their current gen consoles (gamecube release date? 2001). that means you need to find evidence of xavix (conceptual evidence would suffice) before/by 2001 otherwise your argument fails.
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Light guns games have been around since the NES, and I’m sure they were in the arcades before that. So the idea using a special controller to mimic what you are doing in the game is not at all new, remember the powerglove?
The difference is that the technology that the wii uses has only recently become affordable, and the wii was built from the ground up around the idea of using a motion sensing controller that can potentially support many innovative ways for the player to interact.
Xavix looks like some overpriced cheap toy, and I would guess that the software that goes with it can’t hold a flame to anything nintendo has developed in the last twenty years.