So last night I fired up my Wii for some pre-sleepytime tennis. It asked me if I wanted to download the new (Opera) internet browser for Wii, why not? The box gracefully phoned home and upgraded the Opera browser, and I ended up browsing the web for awhile on my HDTV from the couch, mostly video content from StumbleVideo, and rating it thumbs up or down. But it was fun, just mindless media snacking, and about 10 minutes later I was trying to understand if I enjoyed this more on my couch with a Wii remote in my hand, versus a laptop experience. Of course it depends on the content, but this blurring of internet into a more shared, social thing than you can do on a laptop was interesting. GigaOm has more to say on the topic:
GigaOM » Will Wii Remake the Web?
Consider: according to a recent Merrill-Lynch study, by 2011, an astounding 30% of American households will own a Wii. If that estimate holds up (and given the Wii’s still-thundering sales figures, there’s no reason to doubt it), about one out of every three U.S. homes will soon have a new kind of Web browser sitting in their living room.The obvious immediate objection, or course, is “who’s going to browse the Web without a keyboard?” The most obvious immediate answer: the very young, who already send text messages over their cellphones more than they send IMs over their computers. They’ll acclimate quickly to the keyboard-free Web, and being so popular, developers will figure out ways to integrate the Wii’s pointer/nunchuck controller to Web apps which make the experience increasingly intuitive.
The Nintendo Wii has created a playskool-like interface for simple browsing of websites. Their click-and-drag-to-scroll interaction using the Wii controller is clever, as more and more innovation happens around input devices and anything to avoid typing URL’s. I’ll try to upload some photos that show this creative say to pan and zoom within a frame that is too small to hold the entire screen.
Dramatic UI simplification is also why web widgets on mobile devices are emerging lately as a better alterative to the slow and aggrivating paradim of a “web brower” experience on typical mobile phones. The desktop model just isn’t cutting it on smaller handheld devices with more limitations on bandwidth traffic, but I’ll save that for another post someday…
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