Nano-sensors primed to deliver future immersive gaming

THE FUTURE OF Wii Fit-style interactive games that deliver real exercise is hotting up,  promising a new generation of trully immersive, precise-response consoles using nanosensors - thousands of them embodied in your gamesuit.

Here in Singapore, Quantum PI, a company founded by a Polish-born inventor, Dr Marek Michalewicz, has created NanoTrek sensors, the first ever based on quantum tunneling. The micro-mini NEMS (Nano Electro Mechanical Systems) beasts, with a sensing area measuring just 50 x 50 micron, are supposedly more robust than their larger MEMS brethren, with 5x to 10x better vibration- and motion-sensing capabilities.

Frost & Sullivan awarded Dr Michalewicz the South East Asia Industrial Technologies Award for Technology Innovation last week.

The technology could be applied in environments as diverse as oil drilling to concrete wall condition monitoring, to maglev train propulsion (keeping say precise 8mm levitation height across 100 metre train length) or UFO-style anti-gravity engines. But for our IT nerdy enjoyment, it will be fun to wear a sensor suit sporting a few thousand of these little things, for an immersive, realistic movement simulation experience, maybe inside a 3-D VR cave for matching visual immersion.

The device's potential is enormous, especially when combined with MEMS - or future NEMS - sized processing elements. The future roadmap includes wireless, self powered NEMS sensors - now, imagine what this can sense, or do, travelling through your body on its own!

No wonder governments and "unique" investment groups are showing interest in the device. Singapore's A-Star science tech research agency was the first - and another small defence-focused country in the other corner of Asia is the next up, we hear. µ