Bundled with the upcoming Wii game Baby and Me (in Australia), this doll-mote uses the Wiimote’s speaker to make the baby cry or laugh. Turn on the Wii Balance Board, and the simulation is taken to the next level, allowing you to burp the baby, rock the baby and teach him/her/it to walk. (Spoiler alert: the muscle-less, brain-less baby doll can never learn to walk.)

Personally, I could do without all the nappy changing, but I can’t wait to score headshots in CoD with my new infant gun. [aussie-nintendo via GoNintendo via Kotaku]

The $US50 Darth Vader Nintendo Wii Sensor Bar Holder is essentially a sculpture that holds your sensor bar in the place of a lightsaber. So while you flail away at Wii Sports Resort, onlookers will enjoy the tacit implication that you are not only besting the game but the entire Dark Side of the force. Well that, or your friends will realise that your fascination with a 30-year-old movie franchise is depleting your bank account and adversely affecting your overall grasp on reality, especially when playing Wii. [StarWarsShop via ChipChick]

The CTA Digital Football for Wii may look like some cheap, plastic container for your Wiimote. But it’s so much more than that. This product is a manifestation of the way video games are going. Even in the digital realm, physical prowess will soon champion smarts, attention span and the sheer arse power to plant on a couch for days at a time. In the not so distant future, your real self may need to learn to throw a football so your virtual self can keep up.

And while the CTA Digital Football doesn’t appear to be for sale just yet, let it serve as warning. It’s only a matter of time before we’re all getting wedgies during a minigame in Wii Sports. [Kotaku]

Holding two Wiimotes through the power of magnetism, the Charge Station can top off controllers via induction, whether they are wearing silicon sleeves or loaded with Wii Motion Plus add-ons (or whatever other crazy extensions Nintendo could add to the Wiimote). You’ll also find an extra USB port in the back, should you want to charge anything else the old fashioned way.

There’s no word on price/availability. But I’m gonna guess you’ll see it for $US30-40, like most smaller Wiimote charging stands. [Nyko]

Yes, those are the animals that a recently uncovered European Nintendo patent imagines you riding through your living room on this inflatable, Wiimote-implanted cushion. The Wiimote’s accelerometers sense your rocking while the nunchuk, held in one’s hand, serves as reins, a lasso or sword.
While the illustration is strange, the thought of a family of four group-dry-humping a pile of cushions during their next game night is downright repulsive. Of course a patent doesn’t mean Nintendo will produce the thing. But they, at least for a moment, considered it. And that point alone is bad enough. [Siliconera via Kotaku]

It was only a matter of time before the unbridled fandom of Nintendo and Apple transubstantiated into the ultimate hack.

In this clip, we see an OpenGL ES demo in which the Wiimote has been paired (over Bluetooth, of course) with the iPhone. The iPhone is then able to track the Wiimote’s orientation in real time.

At the moment, this demo is nothing more than that—a taste of the Wiimote working on the iPhone. It’ll be interesting to see if/how the project evolves from here. But imagine the potential of a game that used both the iPhone and Wiimote’s accelerometers. Or heck, imagine playing a scaled down Wii Sports on your iPhone.

Let’s make this happen, modders and coders who are working for free, risking Nintendo’s wrath and have about 1000x more coding talent than me. I insist. [Flickr via MAKE]

Nintendo’s North American President Reggie Fils-Aime explained that the Vitality Sensor is just the latest in a chain of products that are first misunderstood and ridiculed, gaining acceptance after they have a chance to prove themselves. Like, oh, the DS, or the Wii, or the Balance Board. Pretty much everything, actually:

[We] probably had a very similar conversation when we first showed the Nintendo DS: how is it going to work, why a touch screen, voice activation—I don’t get it. We probably had a similar conversation about the Wii Remote: how is this going to work, how is it going to work with the games that I want to play—I don’t get it. Now I’m hearing something similar for the Wii Vitality Sensor. And all I can tell you is, with the game developers that we have, we will bring forth an experience that you will say, “Wow, I get it.”

There were surely plenty of folks who ridiculed the DS and Wiimote concepts, but they would’ve been shouted down by the rational majority who could easily see how a touchscreen handheld or a console motion controller would be utilised in game terms.

Most interested people do have specific ideas in mind for the Vitality Sensor, actually, which is why they might not seem terribly excited. It’s not the nobody “gets” the product; it’s that gamers are lamenting the Wii’s accelerating change from a fun console to some kind of distinctly un-fun health device.

Of course Nintendo could blow us all away with some new kind of clever biometric game integration, akin to their previous attempt at a heartrate sensor (except hopefully better), but if they want us to expect—and get excited about—anything beyond Wii Fit II, we’re going to need a little more information—games, clues, or frankly, anything at all. [Fast Company via TechRadar]

Forget about puny robots, this is why Wiimote hacking was invented: To control two giant robotic claws, each of them weighing 15 tonnes and pushing 200 bars, which can separate your torso from your legs in a snap. [Entity Crisis]