Is caricature the Wii's last secret? [update 1]
Though it may be difficult to tell, the adjacent picture is not a live photograph of Shigeru Miyamoto -- it's just a caricature. At Nintendo's E3 2006 press conference, Miyamoto, Reggie Fils-Aime, and Satoru Iwata all played Wii tennis with cartoon versions of themselves.
In an interview with CNN's Chris Morris, Nintendo legend Shigeru Miyamoto hinted that the average Wii owner may also be able to turn themselves into Anime Avatars: "we have some different ideas about how to take advantage of that functionality – and we will be sharing that type of functionality with third parties." Is it a software app, inherent to the Wii, or a special trick involving a Wii camera?
Microsoft showed us at E3 this year how to use its camera for face mapping, what if Nintendo had a camera that could do the same -- only, the Wii camera would turn us all into Japanese cartoons. This is all, of course, rampant speculation, but we wouldn't be surprised if Nintendo managed to placed a little camera inside its TV-mounted sensor.
[update1: Mike Sklens of Planet GameCube has sent us an interview his site did with Takashi Tezuka, who is overseeing Wii Sports. Tezuka confirms that there is software where players can "use some set images and match them up together to create faces" -- in other words, you're going to have to make your own caricatures.]
