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22 Dec 2006
Weather on the Wii
Also the Wii has now some MicroContent. With the introduction of the weather channel last Monday there is now a service that shows the weather around the world on the Wii.
The user sets his favourite city in the country of his Wii.This country setting limits the weather shown to all the cities of his choice of country and only the largest cities elsewhere. I guess the rationale is that in this way only a limited set of weather info has to be downloaded each night. The user can change this country setting, but that is a bit cumbersome. Not so nice for those that live near borders.
The interesting thing of this service is the way the user can browse this weather. The service uses a standard weather view with a set of five pages (sun strength, morning weather, afternoon weather, weather tomorrow and five day forecast). This is convenient. The nice thing is that the user can flip to a earth browser mode. The user sees then a view of the earth based on images from space. One can rotate the earth in all directions, zoom in and out. And the cities with weather information (in image format)are plotted on the globe with the current temperature. If the user moves the cursor of a city with rain, the corresponding sound is heard. Clicking on a city reveals the five pages mentioned earlier.
This earth and it's interaction can be seen as a Canvas, an Items-pane, for MicroContent. That made me dream about a similar application to see other MicroContent Types, such as webcams around the world, panoramic images, etc. A lot is possible and also suitable for the television format. I hope that Nintendo will open up Wii for third party services in the future, which can be bought/downloaded in the Wii shopping channel.
[Inspiration Gizmodo]