At this year's disappointing E3 convention, just about the only buzz from the Nintendo keynote was the announcement of the Wii MotionPlus. It's a gyroscope module that plugs into the base of the Wiimote which is supposed to give it 1:1 responsiveness. In other words, the players' motions in 3D space are duplicated in realtime on the screen.

But wait-- doesn't it do this already?

Not exactly. Most people don't realize that the current Wiimote, which uses a combination of an infrared camera and a three-axis accelerometer, is actually not that accurate at translating players' motions. Instead, the Wii relies heavily on software to interpret the data and implement the player's intentions. As anyone who owns a Wii can attest, it's not always very good at this.

Current Wii games, like Red Steel, here, rely on pointing and relatively simple motions. This offers a fair illusion of responsiveness, but is far from the 1:1 accuracy that the MotionPlus promises.

So now, nearly two years into the Wii's product cycle, Nintendo is up to it's old tricks-- with a new twist, perhaps. Sell the Wii as the cheapest next gen platform, then make people buy extra peripherals to get a fully-functional system.

It's an interesting strategy, really. Pirates may be able to make copies of the new Wii Sports, but what about the hardware it requires?

In the late 1870s, scientist and eugenicist Sir Francis Galton developed an image of the prototypical "face of crime" by creating composite photos of men convicted of serious offenses.

Though Galton failed to discover anything abnormal in his composite criminal faces, he did find that the resulting visages were shockingly handsome. (The middle face here is the product of 14 criminals.) Studies have since established that people find prototypical faces—those with average features—to be attractive.

– Maggie Wittlin, Seed Magazine

An attractive 'average' face generated by the Face Research Lab

Back in September, 2006, a paper published in the journal Psychological Science proposed a new explanation for this phenomenon: Prototypical faces are pleasing because they're easy for the brain to process.

"The principle finding is that you like a pattern to the extent that you classify the pattern fast," the study's author and psychologist at the University of California, San Diego Piotr Winkielman said.

On the one hand, this is pretty old-hat to anybody in the design business, and particularly anyone in the interface design business (web or otherwise).

We all learned in UI 101 that (a) a good operative definition of "usability" is that a user doesn't have to think about how to do what she's going to do, (b) that one of the best ways we can accomplish this is give them interface elements that they've already learned how to use.

On the other hand, the Gestalt Laws of Prägnanz provide us with some formal figurations that explain why our brains like puzzles.

Just as doing a bit of physical exercise, mental exercise is not only helpful to us in the long run, but can provide an "adrenaline-rush".

A simple Gestalt 'Figure-Ground' puzzle

So, obviously our designs should be created to take advantage of our user's perceptual fluency both positively (providing familiar UI components) and negatively (using Gestalt and other techniques to provide users with the endorphin-rush of solving a simple visual puzzle).

The really interesting question is whether you can do both of these things at once in a way that preserves the value of each. Now that's a design problem.

The HCI Bibliography site has posted - on a shareware license - a full copy of Task-Centered User Interface Design: A Practical Introduction by Clayton Lewis and John Rieman.

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