Nintendo Wii U Uses the Earth as Reference for Motion Sensing

There's a fair bit to the Nintendo Wii U GamePad that you might initially think - with one of the internal components offering nine-axis motion controls using a magnetic sensor.

Speaking the folk who helped Nintendo produce the new Wii U controller, PNI Sensor Corporation, VentureBeat discovered that the GamePad offers the potential for far improved motion control as the Japanese game maker was looking for "something that had the means to do better motion tracking".

Chief executive officer for PNI, Becky Oh, confirmed that the GamePad uses a magnetic sensor to give a "nine-axis understanding of its orientation" - where the controller is in relative space, around 15 times the resolution of motion sensors in the iPhone 5.

"[The gyro and accelerometer] are good at tracking relativistic change. But it doesn't tell you absolutely where you're pointing and where the pointer is. What the magnetic sensor does is use the Earth's magnetic field as a reference. It can always guide it back to what the absolute position is.

The GamePad was designed to work in a variety of different gaming scenarios so Nintendo hoped to learn from lessons with the original Wii controller and developed a technology with PNI that performs no matter what players do.

Swing, tilt, shake, Nintendo Land was designed to showcase the additional freedom in movement as well as the touch-screen.

Developers would still have to optimise games to make better use of the added motion sensors in the GamePad, which could be problematic when paired with the original Wii Remotes that rely on six axis controls.