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To create a useable, workable subdictionary for the game, Shimada said the team had to start thinking more from a design perspective in order to solve problems. For example, another challenge was how to recognize short words, which were more difficult for the engine to determine as being correct or incorrect. Longer utterances are easier for the system to recognize because there’s more data to compare against the “correct” answer. The more syllables, the easier to recognize. “We designed a system to return not just one answer, but several answers ranked according to their correct-ish-ness,” said Shimada. As long as the answer detected is one of the top ranked answers, it is accepted as correct. In Japanese, said Shimada, the word for “yellow” fits into this category because older people often pronounce the word as “chi i ro” or “i i ro” instead of the correct “ki i ro.” Brain Age, however, accepts any of these pronunciations as a correct answer. When the team came to deal with handwriting recognition, similar problems arose. The team’s first step was to collect as much data as possible about the basic handwriting of numbers and letters. They used batch processing to assess all the data gathered, repeatedly collecting data until they had enough for a usable database.
Again, because the design team required that the game be played quickly, Shimada and his group needed to enable the software to detect different varieties of handwriting under rapidfire conditions, when penmanship is likely to be at its most slovenly. They were also tasked with determining how the end of input would be signaled (the final answer is when the stylus leaves the touch screen). Shimada also explained how Kanji characters were incorporated into the Brain Age games, as well as what Nintendo’s timeline looked like for each phase of the development against a project release date. Finally, Shimada mentioned a few of the things his team is working on presently. “Currently, we are staying busy creating development tool libraries for the Wii and the DS,” he said. “Late last year we were finishing up touches and trying to get them out to developers.” Also late last year, the team finished “NintendoWare for the Revolution [Wii],” a tool for implementing graphics and music on the Wii.
“Until last year, you needed Wii development hardware to view these effects,” Shimada said, whereas now the company offers an auxillary devices that lets developers preview effects on a PC. Other development advances include finishing a system that lets developers create fur efficiently and developing Codecs and predictive input for the Wii. “As soon as these [technologies] are ready, we will provide them to developers around the world. Some of these are available already,” Shimada said. Also on their plate, Shimada’s team is conducting speech synthesis experiments for the Wii, with hopes of turning the fruits of their labor into software that can be provided to other software makers and third-party developers. |
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