Released in 2008, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed just missed out on MotionPlus, much to the developer's chagrin. Many developers were blindsided by the announcement and didn't have time to add support. For non-Nintendo developers, the announcement of the MotionPlus and MotionPlus games were not such a thrilling time. Just a year later, Nintendo announced their newest edition to the Zelda series, The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword as a MotionPlus exclusive.

With full six degrees of freedom, the MotionPlus allowed Wii Remotes to perform full 3D tracking just like VR controllers do today! This adapter featured a 3-axis gyroscope (gyro) that finally allowed the controller to measure rotational motion in addition to the translational motion from the existing accelerometers. At E3 in 2008, that all changed with the announcement of the Wii MotionPlus adapter. Unfortunately, the standard Wii Remote wasn't capable of much more. With the lackluster Motion controls being one of the chief complaints, it seemed as though developers wanted to address that problem in a big way. Behind the scenes, they began development on a new Zelda title upon the completion of Twilight Princess. The Birth of Modern Motion Controls ¶ĭevelopers at Nintendo knew that if they were ever going to be able to deliver on the promise that the Wii Remote showed in its early days, that another leap in technology was needed. However, even with all of these clever work arounds, actions like swinging a sword in Twilight Princess never felt like much more than hitting a button. Throughout the library of early Wii games there are tons of small examples like this littered about with developers pushing the limits of the Wii remote. Metroid Prime 3 used the position and distance between the two infrared lights of the sensor bar to enable complex twisting and pulling actions. Wii can read tilt through detecting the force of gravity to figure out its orientation. Yet even with this limitation, Nintendo developers used every trick in the book to get what they could to read motions in these games. Without a gyroscope, the Wii Remote could only detect half the possible axis of movement.

This is know as 'six degrees of freedom' and is the standard for VR controllers today. Both together can measure any movement within 3D space.

Gyroscopes measure rotational motion, which is the angular velocity of an object as it rotates around a point (the center of the gyro). Accelerometers measure translational motion, specifically the change of velocity of an object as it travels from one point to another in space.

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