"If you feel that Wii, the game console by Nintendo, has completely revolutionized your conception of gaming and technology, it is likely you have never paid a visit to the Industrial Technology Research Institute.

At ITRI South in Tainan County, the Microsystems Technology Department’s Human Motion-decoded Microsystems Department has developed a small Frisbee-shaped device containing a special microsensor. The engineers refer to it as a “flying squirrel.” Hook the device to your waist and you can spin a virtual hula hoop along with the character on the monitor. This game even helps you count your number of revolutions and the calories you have burned.

Now, approach the juice maker the engineers have equipped with a receiver and start gyrating. The juice maker will begin to churn. The faster you spin, the faster it will prepare your drink.

Having fun? This is some of the futuristic “happy technology” ITRI has created. Even more impressive, the little flying squirrel has a response time of twenty-five milliseconds. This makes Wii, which comes in at seventy-five milliseconds, look a bit sluggish by comparison.

“Happy technology is the trend of the future,” says ITRI president Johnsee Lee. He feels that, in the future, the application of technology will change directions from “usefulness” to “happiness.” Just as with the Wii, the emphasis will be on applications, humanness and integration, and not simply on the manufacturing of components.

Nonetheless, the greatest challenge the engineers face in doing R&D for this “happy technology” is not the technology itself, but rather figuring out how to think playfully.

The sensor module can even be used to drive a juice maker. Start gyrating and the juice maker will begin to churn.

Making People Happy Is the Hard Part

ITRI relies on a team of young engineers with an average age of thirty to break down the mode of thinking typical of traditional engineers – first design components, and then set about figuring out ways to use them. Instead, taking context and life as their starting point, they are working to achieve new breakthroughs for ITRI’s “happy technology” in hopes of one day creating new playful technologies that are even more fun than Wii.

“Figuring out how to make this thing fun is really not our engineers’ strong point,” says Ming-chieh Tsai, deputy director of ITRI’s Microsystems Technology Center, adding, “Our real challenge is figuring out how to excite you, so you’ll play with even more enthusiasm.”

Just twenty-seven years old, ITRI associate researcher Lu Ying-ko, a graduate of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at National Taiwan University, says that, when he is standing in front of a game playing it, he often finds himself forgetting he is playing a game because he is concentrating to see if there is any lag-time in the action on the screen. Lu says he is always being reminded to start from the “human” perspective.

“Deputy Director Tsai asks us to think about contexts, like, ‘Where are you?‘ or ‘What are you doing?’, not technological breakthroughs,” says Lu.

Another challenge lies with communication.

“Before, at school, I always did my own thing, but now, having come here, I cooperate with people from different fields, and everyone has their own ideas,” says Shun-nan Liou, manager of the Human Motion-decoded Microsystems Department. The department’s twenty-five person team is comprised of experts from a wide range of disciplines, including information engineering, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, materials engineering, and systems engineering. When the department holds meetings, all the engineers are completely free to express themselves from the perspective of their respective specializations.

What makes engineers happiest is seeing that the things they have made are the things people want. When the team was first brought together, the members lacked an understanding of one another, with the result that meetings frequently dragged on for an entire day. Occasionally, despite their attempts to communicate, emotions would flare and such indiscreet remarks as “stubborn idiot” would slip out. Yet this continuous process of coming to understand one another allowed everyone to stay involved from beginning to end, associate researcher Chin-lin Hsieh notes, ultimately yielding a sense of accomplishment entirely different from the results of simply engineering single components, as in the past.

Deputy Director Tsai calls himself a “technology chef” these days. This is because, when preparing food, the same ingredients can be used to create different dishes, depending on the cook’s creativity and style, and what the cook creates is new value for the people that enjoy the meal. In the past, Taiwan was used to being a farmer, providing ingredients to those that did the cooking. Now it is time for it to learn how to be a chef.

At the moment, their technology can already be used with computer games and TV console games at the same time. In the future, however, the goal is to integrate computer and television games by using the sensor module as a universal remote control for home entertainment systems. Users will be able to wield this remote to view photographs and computer files and as a joystick for gaming. As their first step in this direction, the engineers have set themselves the goal of outdoing Nintendo’s Wii.

Human-Machine Interaction – Unlimited Possibilities

They aspire to imbue games with added value. Just as with the fruit juicer, they aim to tie entertainment to common things like taking medicine, losing weight, and medical recuperation, thereby “turning something boring into something interesting.”

Moreover, in addition to linking this technology to movement, the engineers want to take it in the direction of enhancing human emotion, memory, and behavior. For instance, is it possible to attach a sensor to a car key that will prevent the car from starting when an intoxicated person inserts the key?

“What makes engineers happiest is seeing that the things they have made are the things people want,” says Deputy Director Tsai. What gives him the greatest sense of accomplishment is being able to create technology that directly touches the lives of consumers, and seeing them scream, laugh and get excited because of a game.

This team of ITRI engineers expects to see the first wave of products based on their technology hit the market by the end of the year. Still, some uncertainties remain. For instance, once the technology has been transferred, how can they ensure that the same quality witnessed in the laboratory is also achieved in mass production? And, are domestic Taiwanese companies capable of performing marketing and building brand image with the same skill as major international companies? These are some of the challenges that must be confronted in taking creative technology to the level of real products that will be used by consumers.

Translated from the Chinese by Stan Blewett

Chinese Version: 比Wii更好玩？