Wii TV is live and curious...

Nintendo have finally released their Wii TV channel to the US as of last night, to mostly promising feedback. In Japan, where the channel was released last November, it offers streaming web video with content such as interviews with Wii game designers. In one video feature, Nintendo legend Shigeru Miyamoto describes the company's upcoming exercise game, Wii Fit.

The service has a selection of features that mostly seem to work so far. The channel features promotional videos and an index of Wii and DS games to help the Nintendo nerd make essential purchasing decisions. It also allows demos of DS games to be sent to your handheld. The 8 titles available for temporary download have already been released, which is a bit poor, but i guess it's a start

They haven't supplied an online store for download, but once you select a game you're keen on, it will only provide you with a recommendation of outlet stores such as Amazon or Wal-Mart, which seems a shame. You'd like to think there was an online purchase , but it would seem the amount of memory required (126 blocks of system memory to download, plus another 126 blocks for temporary data storage) to run Nintendo TV, negates the 'click and play option'.

Other features include monitoring what games you play and when, which, before you renegade Orson Wells 1984 style, is optional. This info is stored and used to help suggest titles that you may be interested in, nice to see that you can manually rate games though, prohibiting too much AI forcing your hand.

It also monitors the TV you use, possibly to check who's doing HD tech, and it seems pretty bias towards recommending Nintendo titles, but that's to be expected i guess.

All round though it seems like a good start, and now they've joined forces with the BBC iPlayer, it would seem like Nintendo have moved one more step ahead of the XBox and the lumbering PS3.

CALM attempt to break records and save lives

The charity CALM is trying to raise £50,000 by attempting to break a world record, twice. Two young guys have been asked to try to wear a total of 250 T-Shirts each. The current record is 224 you can watch it here on YouTube. The idea behind the 500/100 campaign, which will be supported by local London paper The Metro and MTV amongst others, is to ask companies to pay £100 to have their company logo on one T-Shirt. Hopefully, this will result in CALM reaching their target (500 T-Shirts=£50,000) and be world beaters at the same time. Check out the teaser film below.

GOOD LUCK CALM!

Lego+Batman=Awesome

It's quite amazing what you can do if you've got a few weeks and A LOT of spare Danish building bricks.... Kudos to YouTube user 'Keshen8' who has matched the trailer for The Dark Knight trailer shot for shot, watch out for the truck flipping over, its priceless.

How to give yourself hand cramp...

I’m currently learning After Effects and I’ve noticed that you can achieve pretty impressive results with even a limited ability but it would never cross my mind to export my movie as an image sequence, print out every single frame (that’s 25 frames per second my friend) cut out all the images by hand and then stitch it back together in the striking way in which Javan Ivey has done.

Pretty awesome.

There's a whole lot of good in those little O's!

Otello, is not just a great name for a breakfast cereal, it’s what Vodafone hope to be a revolution in the way we search for content on mobile devices. The idea is that you could see a poster or read something in a national newspaper, photograph it with your camera phone and then search via the captured image. You would then receive related content via MMS.

This is an exciting prospect and could mark a whole new wave of advertising, that the consumer actually chooses to seek out rather than avoid. Sadly the technology is still very much in its infancy.

Still, to end on an optimistic note, some genius has already cracked it with regards to searching for music . A similar application currently comes as standard on Sony Ericsson handsets.

Emulation is the highest form of flattery...

...Or so it would seem, as some young scamp has created a SNES emulator for their iPhone. By sneakily coding an ap which allows you to use the bottom part of the touchscreen as a SNES remote, with the top part of the phone in 32,768 glorious colours (a la Gameboy advance) allowing us all to Tiger Uppercut our way home on the tube via Streetfighter 2.

Check out the Beta test video, and thanks to Engadget for the heads up.

Become a 3D genius in minutes!

I once tried to teach myself 3D animation, waaaaaaaaay back in University, suffice to say, we didn't get along and i spent the next two and a half years hunched over a light box drawing frame after frame after frame, desperately trying to be the next Matt Groening.

Well now it would seem my months of tracing may finally come in handy. Those crafty antipodeans at ACVT have whipped up some software that allows the user to trace real objects within video footage:

"The user interacts with VideoTrace by tracing the shape of the object to be modelled over one or more frames of the video. By interpreting the sketch drawn by the user in light of 3D information obtained from computer vision techniques, a small number of simple 2D interactions can be used to generate a realistic 3D model."

If it's half as quick as the video demonstrates, then it could really help revolutionise small to medium budget 3D projects. No more painful building in Maya, just film it and rotoscope it, job done!

I'd love to know if anyone has used it, please let me know your thoughts.