14 DAY TRIAL // A patent has been recently unveiled showing that Nintendo had plans to launch an add-on for the Wii home gaming console that could display colors and lighting that were connected to the video games the player was enjoying.
The patent was registered in 2009, which might suggest that the add-on was only in the planning stage and that it will never reach gamers, presumably because the developers have not found a good way of using it in the gaming experiences they were creating.
The patent shows a light system powered by Light Emitting Diodes that would plug into the Nintendo Wii and then was to be placed somewhere near the top of the television set, with the colored lights flashing in sequence, synched to player inputs or to game elements.
The device would have had red, green and blue LEDs, with a total of 256 colors able to be generated and a lens was included, allowing for a single beam to be projected by all three LEDs if the game required it.
The Nintendo Wii is the current-generation console that saw the largest number of patents linked to peripherals registered, with a lot of them never seeing the light of day.
The most successful add-on created by Nintendo was the Balance Board, a device that has been used by a number of fitness-based experiences to allow the player to weight himself, but also in the process of performing some exercises.
The problem with complex add-ons, like the proposed LED-powered one, is that they require a specifically designed video games experience that uses them in a successful way and reaches big sales numbers in order to be attractive to the average gamer.
The console peripheral market has recently taken off with the launch of the PlayStation Move for the PS3 and the Kinect for the Xbox 360.