I was lucky enough to get a new Nintendo Wii games console on the 8^th of December 2006, the day of its European launch.

 

This shiny piece of white plastic encases the culmination of years of research, millions of pounds of investment, the latest silicon chip technology, and (for me at least) years of patient waiting.

 

One of the games I have for my new machine is Wii Golf. Now, I have owned many different golf games over the years, on many different games machines, and there is no way I could get my girlfriend to take part. For starters, she hates golf. She also isn’t to big a fan of games. So a golf game is not her idea of spending quality time together. Until now…

 

And worse… she can’t stop winning!

 

So what makes this machine interesting? The graphics are nowhere near the HD enabled Xbox 360 or Playstation 3. The sound is fine; Dolby Pro Logic II providing nice rich tones. It is cheap. In fact it was £189 with a set of games thrown in; the Xbox 360 £280 when it came out, and the Playstation3 could be as much as £425 when it comes out later this year!

 

But the real factor that makes non-gamers, like my girlfriend, love it is its unique controller.

 

Nicknamed the Wiimote, the Wii controller is a stylish mixture of an Apple I-Pod and a TV remote control. It contains sensors that can detect what angle it is held at, how fast it is moving and where on the screen it is pointing. So to play golf, you swing the controller like a golf club!

 

Rather than spend months trying to train your hands in the art of digit-acrobatics required for most standard games, the Nintendo Wii asks the user to mimic reality. The interface between user and program disappears in a split second of understanding. Anyone can play these games. Anyone.

 

So if a rethink of the way we interact with a video game can attract new audiences, what would happen if we found a better way of interacting with the Personal Computer?

 

The mouse was invented in 1964, and has changed very little since. The technology that drives it may differ (balls and laser encased in plastic rather than wheels wrapped in wood) but the fundemental function remains the same. So what is next? How will we be interacting with our computers 5, 10 years from now?

 

Alex, our work placement student, sent me a video the other day. It shows one of the first public demos of a new Human Computer Interaction (HCI) technology.

 

Watch it here

 

I think it speaks for itself…

 

Alastair Paines

 

Google desktop has had a chequered reception - security problems, indexing central mail/file servers. The users love it though, mainly because their PC's are full of important information that's crucial to their job, and Google allows them to navigate through their lack of organisation.

 

At Signals, users PC's aren't backed up, and we assume they might have a disk crash or the machines stolen during the night. All critical data is kept on the servers, so it worries me that people here see any benefit from installing Google Desktop, since 'benefit' means it's either indexing our server filesystems, or confirming the existence of non backed-up 'useful stuff'

 

The silver lining - We have an archive server that contains the last 10 years worth of Signals jobs. That totals around 900GB of data, and we refer back to this content on a day to day basis. After a few half hearted attempts at using windows indexing technology, and a bespoke attempt, we decided to give GD a try.  With the standard install, plus a widely available plugin to make it run as an externally accessible web server, and some hacking of the resource DLLs, we've created our own mini version of google, and it works brilliantly - indexing inside PDF's email PST's, and most other file types.  All presented in an interface that everyone's familiar with.

 

 

Gary