The Wii Fit...end of Yoga, Pilates [From Istanbul To Sand Hill Road]

At the Game Developer's Conference 2008, by far the most inspiring product I saw was the Wii Fit; both the software and the fantastic sensory hardware that comes with it. It's a pad with a bunch of weight and possibly motion sensors that can pinpoint where and how you stand. It is accompanied by 40 games that are aimed to make you exercise your core body. There is a unique game for almost every muscle group, and it even makes you do the yoga moves and figures out how accurately you do it based on what it senses on the pad. It's nothing short of brilliant. Games get harder as you go. The pad also measures your progress, your weight and how well you've trained your core. There is a skiing game that makes you move your knees left and right, there is a balance game that exercises your glutes, a ski jumping game that makes you do squats and it even makes you do pushups. This may be the solution to the obesity problem in the US. The game went out on sale in Japan in December 2007 ! and since it has sold 1.1 million copies in Japan. It hits the US stores May 19th. It is an absolute must have. When good hardware is combined with good software something great happens. Both the Wii and the iPhone are the two best examples of it. They remind me of the following Alan Kay quote: "People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware." P.S. Google gets this quote too by the way...their data centers are their hardware, and it's a lot more impressive than both the Wii and the iPhone.