Dream at the top of your lungs

I really enjoy reading Popular Science Magazine. It’s full of fairly good guesses about the distant future, great projections of scientific breakthroughs in the next few years, and, my favorite, astute reporting on the latest gadgetry.

But here’s the problem: In the April 2007 issue they were wrong about technology. Not a mere slip or typo but a complete error in an article entitled The “Wii’s Wild Controller” part of a “How It Works” feature.

These types of articles usually interest me as I am a person who avidly disassembles and reassembles gadgets (the latter with a slightly lower success rate). I assume that the people who write them are similarly enthralled with the what the hell does that do? sort of fun that comes along with breaking things open.

Writer Lauren Aaronson promises to explain the inner workings of what the magazine cover calls an “amazing machine.” Sadly, when it came to one of the Wiimote’s crowning features, the screen pointer, Ms. Aaronson not only drops the ball, she lets it roll into the next county. And no one in magazine’s fact-checking department runs after it.

Here’s a scan of the article (with the offending portion blown up for emphasis.)

Aaronson claims that the Wiimote sends IR light to the sensor bar (like a normal remote) where it is picked up and translated into an exact location.

This, my friends, is bull.

I’m someone who has, in fact, taken apart a Wiimote. I’m guessing that Ms. Aaronson does not fall into this category. Perhaps she just read the name “sensor bar” on the package and guessed how the pointer function works. She has, in fact, exactly REVERSED its operation.

The “sensor bar” does not pick up anything. It’s nothing more than a couple of IR LEDs (fancy light bulbs for those of you who didn’t spend your childhood in a RadioShack.) The Wiimote actually has a sensor (think: small camera) in the front of the controller that detects the “sensor bar” position and figures out what the gamer is pointing at. That little camera is what makes it all work.

Not only do I know this, but I can prove it. Look at these two pictures:

Here is the Wiimote with the back off.* The red circle is the unit in question. Sure, it could just be the most advanced LED mount you could cram into the end of the thing, but this next image helps make it clear.

See that? 8 pins! LED’s use 2! Weeelll maybe they use some sort of 7 LED + common ground array (hardly, but whatever)… actually a much more likely story: Those leads connect a camera-like sensor to the Wiimote circuit board.

Even further than pin-counting, further than speculation about LED arrays, further than ill-informed marketing, comes the proof that Ms. Aaronson did not do her homework: You don’t need the so-called “sensor bar”

Yup, that’s right. Take that thing out. (If it were actually a sensor bar your pointer wouldn’t work without it.) Replace the bar with a couple of candles (or the USB powered array that I made for use on my desktop) and prest-o-change-o your Wiimote springs into pointing action!

Observe…

So, PopSci deconstructs something I know about–and they’re wrong? That’s a lot of nerd cred down the drain. Who knows? That “Most Advanced Jet Fighter” on page 48: Does it really run on pixie dust and genetically modified monkeys? Well maybe, but without publication integrity who cares?

Normally the lowest person in a publication chain gets the unfortunate job of fact-checking. But in an edition where the column “From the Editor:” bulges with some serious bragging about their “Wii Broke It” online deconstruction of a Wii, as well as Senior Editor Mike Haney’s great “How It Works” feature, I think the failure is at all levels.

From the Editor Mark Jannot:

Because even if I’m not thrilled that we destroyed a Wii to reveal and document its mechanisms, a am happy that we were motivated by a classically PopSci urge to know–and tell. and I think that you’ll agree that the intel in the How It Works package that Senior Editor Mike Haney and his team have delivered, beginning on page 47, is worth any number of disemboweled videogame consoles.

Well yeah, any number but zero…

If you work for PopSci:
If you want somebody to take things apart: I’m an engineer, graduating from an institution that stresses communication and writing, and I’m looking for a job.

*As I’m not home in CA and able to photograph my Wii at the moment, I snagged a couple of the images from http://www.sparkfun.com/ and added a few red circles for this post.

Filed under: Gadgetry, Rants on March 13th, 2007