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Police use Mii picture to put together wanted poster

Japanese officers turned to the Wii instead of a sketch artist to render the image.

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Gaming | by Stephen Schenck | Fri Feb 6, 2009 1:40PM | 0 comments

Sure, the Wii is a fun gaming platform, but there's so much more you can do with it. We just took a look at some of the content available in Channels, and don't forget the Wii Fit to keep you in tip-top shape. Since the Japanese brought us the Wii in the first place, it's only fitting that they've come up with an innovative new use for the console: using Mii creation to generate pictures for wanted posters.

Trying to locate the suspect in a hit-and-run accident, Japanese police created posters featuring a picture of the model car involved and a Wii-generated composite image of the driver. There's no statement from the department as to why it made the decision to take this route, but we can see what the officers were thinking. Mii creation is very easy to pick up, so instead of witnesses just describing features to a sketch artist, and then trying to correct any errors, using the Wii gives them direct control over the process.

Granted, a Mii obviously looks like a cartoon and not a life-like depiction of a person, but that shouldn't matter in this case. People tend to have an easier time recognizing subjects in caricatures, for example, then in realistic sketches. The same features that get over-emphasized in these kind of depictions, like a big nose or ears that stick out, are also the ones we're probably most likely to use to recognize a person. We'll just have to wait and see if the police catch their man to know if it worked this time.

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