Nintendo’s Wii™ game console

The provisional name was Revolution, but it became Wii after the company decided that the new name was short, to the point, easy to pronounce and distinctive. It means the idea of “we”, or, it has been suggested, the idea of two people side by side in the letter i. The games are often designed for more than one to play. Certainly the name has provoked some lavatory humour. Applications for the trade mark have gone in but it has not yet been registered in Europe or the United States.

For the benefit of those who missed the excitement, the console works on a new principle. Formerly a console was designed so that by pushing buttons, pulling on joysticks and so on you controlled what happened on the screen.

Now you wave the console around. The actual movement – and the rapidity of it – controls what happens on the screen. You might be playing table tennis, running, or boxing. Others can play at the same time, or you may be competing against a character in a game. Apparently it can be very addictive. Demonstrations can be seen as a trailer on Youtube.

A remote control console with buttons on it, in shape rather like a bigger version of a typical TV remote, was originally envisaged as the usual way to play. Due to excited players gripping too hard or hitting them against hard surfaces, they sometimes got broken, and a special glove is now often used.

There are often fan sites that suggest relevant patents for electronic products, but in this case I drew a blank. I did notice, while Googling, that Nintendo has been threatened with court action over infringing American patents.

One of those companies was Interlink Electronics, who alleged infringement of their American patent 6850221, “Trigger operated electronic device”. Sources on the Web said that it was indeed rather similar to the way that Wii™ works. Now, one of the things that you can do on Esp@cenet® is to ask, when looking at a record, to “View list of citing documents”. This refers to those patent documents that a patent office examiner might cite as relevant to a new application.

I duly asked to view, and only one patent document was listed, EP 1757343, my Patent of the Month.

It was by Nintendo, and had been published two years later, in February 2007. The console as illustrated does look rather short in comparison with the real thing, but otherwise the drawings look very similar to the product. The document explains that there is an “imaging information arithmetic unit” at the front end of the console which processes infrared signals containing data about the “position and/or attitude of the controller” (and its speed) which are sent to LED modules within the Sensor Bar. This is a separate unit which is either above or below the television, and is centered. The Sensor Bar also calculates how far away the signal is, to allow for forward or backward movement.

Nintendo’s EP 1832321-322 explain about “Motion determining apparatus and storage medium having motion determining program stored thereon” and are probably relevant.

This patent application is for Europe, and contains a search report (unlike the equivalent American document). The report lists three patents that have a certain similarity, the others being US 5724106 by Gateway 2000, another trigger device, and US 5459489 by TV Interactive Data Corporation. The European document is still only an application and has not yet been granted.

Ironically, confident sources on the Web state that the two patent documents don’t have a huge amount in common other than that they are both remotes with buttons  that use infrared rays, which is what most do. That could explain while the action has, in fact, been dropped.