Nintendo producer Shigeru Miyamoto has shared his personal vision for the future of Mii characters, suggesting they could eventually be linked to personal identification documents across the globe.
Speaking about the concept, Miyamoto highlighted how players in western regions invest significant effort into crafting their avatars. He expressed a desire for these creations to extend beyond mobile titles like Pikmin Bloom and link directly with Nintendo Accounts, potentially housing hundreds of millions of user-generated characters.
Memory Efficiency of Mii Avatars
A primary factor behind Miyamoto's idea is the remarkably small data footprint required for the avatars. While standard avatars can consume several megabytes of storage, individual Mii characters consist of only a few hundred bytes.
- Avatars take up a fraction of normal memory usage, requiring only hundreds of bytes per character.
- The compact design originated from early hardware specifications to fit dozens of people onto a Wii controller.
- Nintendo's focus on achieving maximum effect with minimal memory means hundreds of millions of Miis could easily fit into a compact data space.
Miyamoto acknowledged that discussing the concept feels akin to sharing a trade secret, but noted that sharing such ideas makes daily work enjoyable. While physical identification requirements vary by region—such as Japan where physical identification cards are mandatory primarily for foreign residents and tourists rather than nationals—the producer remains curious about whether Mii-linked personal IDs will ever become a reality.