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Wii be rollin’…

I’ve just emerged from my thrice-weekly morning session with the bike trainer. It’s gotten a lot easier to deal with the boredom of stationary pedaling thanks to the Wii that we bought “for the kids”.

No, dear reader, I am not in fact coordinated enough to play Zelda or Wii Sports while pedaling furiously. (OK… make that semi-furiously.) What I am able to do is surf the web using the Wii’s built-in web browser, pointing and clicking the Wii Remote in one hand while maintaining pace and position on the bike. And this, from my point of view, is one very good reason to get hold of one of these gadgets. Now I can read a wide variety of stuff while doing my workout, and exercise free choice over it. That’s progress!

There are plenty of other reasons to check out the Wii. The remote (which has 6 degrees of free motion as well as buttons and internal accelerometers) is a really interesting input device, and it can interface via Bluetooth with a PC or Mac, and folks are coming out with some great homebrew hardware and software to provide connectivity for developers. Combine the remote with Flex, WiiFlash and Papervision3D, and suddenly you’re looking at an impressive 3D visualization platform. Hmmm…