Benedetto Vigna: the inventor behind the Wii console 3D motion sensor
A lots of inventions, directly or indirectly, deeply change everyday lives of most of the population of the World.
Today MEMS (Micro Electro Mechanical Systems), for example, are everywhere: who ever got simply a mobile phone, a game console or a simple washing machine, uses them without even knowing they exist.
The man who brought this technology to main consumer goods, pioneer in microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), is the Italian engineer and inventor Benedetto Vigna.
Before to continue, let’s clarify: what the MEMS are?
Basically, they are systems that integrate sensors with microchips: the first capture information, the other process it, making decisions and giving orders to implement the appropriate actions. A typical application of MEMS were airbags.
In 1995, Benedetto Vigna started to work for STMicroelectronics, one of Europe’s leading electronics and semiconductor manufacturers, where he started to work on a great innovation: not only miniaturize the MEMS to a scale never seen before, but create a completely new type, with the third dimension and therefore able to interpret the movements of the real world.
The result was a great invention: a highly successful 3D motion-control-sensor, heart of the Wii console from Japanese company Nintendo. (more…)
