Wiimote Hacking Goes Big-Time

The Wall Street Journal is taking Wiimote hacking seriously. A front-page article from this past weekend discusses the many uses to which enterprising hackers have put the Wiimote, the motion sensing piece of the Wii console. Included is a video of a few of the projects in action. "Tim Groeneboom, who lives in the Netherlands, uses his Wii-mote to spice up his deejay act. He was inspired by a video on the Web of a California music student bobbing in front of the computer in his room and making jabbing motions with the Wii-mote to splice different tracks. During his second gig with the Wii-mote, Mr. Groeneboom, 22, says he was able to roam up to about 100 feet from his deejay booth and still be able to control how the music blended and do some sound effects ... Aaron Rasmussen has a sporting purpose for his Wii-mote. At his Garden Grove, Calif. software company, USMechatronics, he and his partner stuck a tennis racket in the 'hand' of a $40,000 industrial robot and then tweaked the Wii-mote to control the robot's arm so it can hit back tennis balls on the factory floor. 'This is what we do to relax,' he says."

Power Glove?

[neostorm]

I am absolutely dying for someone (nintendo maybe even) to make a glove with a wii remote on each finger and thumb. Imagine the possibilities for interaction with a 3D environment with this. You'd be able to grasp things in the 3D space of your game, and your hands position could be tracked more accurately than any other device of a similar type has before. It would be an expensive piece of hardware, but I'd buy it if I could grasp a ball and throw it to another player in a networked game of... something where you throw balls at other players. It doesn't matter! It'd be great.

Wiimote on the PS3?

[jafo]

The Wiimote is bluetooth, the PS3 controllers are bluetooth, why don't we have bowling and boxing, using the Wiimote, on the PS3? I mean, there is a driver for Linux to use the Wiimote, and the PS3 runs Linux, so...

The Wiimote and the games that use it are really the only part of the Wii that are at all interesting. The console itself is not that good, it's basically PS-2 generation horsepower and video. So why don't we have titles that support the option of using a Wiimote with the PS3?

Now, the PS3 has enough horsepower, and the Wii has little enough, that I wonder how hard it would be to build a Wii emulator for the PS3. Who would support this effort? How about the games companies who aren't selling anywhere near their potential because people like me haven't been able to get a console for the last 5 months? Seems like they'd have a pretty stong incentive...

I say this in part because in December I was quite hot to get a Wii, specifically for this set of holiday parties we have. However, I've seen a Wii in the stores *ONCE* since November. At the time (January) I thought "Oh, the supply problems are over", but I haven't seen them in the stores since then.

Sean

Re:Power Glove?

[Westacular]

Well, thanks to gravity, the accelerometers can do a pretty decent job of determining the orientation (roll and pitch) of a static Wiimote. That's actually how most of the driving games work: you handle the Wiimote as if it's the crossbar in a steering wheel, and the current degree of tilt to either side controls the steering.

I imagine for a glove controller you could get a reasonable amount of information about a hand gesture from that; the lack of yaw data is a limiting factor.

Re:Power Glove?

[HanClinto]

You're exactly right about gravity being used to calculate pitch/roll. This is what I used when I made a rag-doll physics simulator for my Wiimote [sourceforge.net]. Sadly though, in order to be accurate, determining pitch/roll completely from the accellerometers [wiili.org] must assume that there is no linear accelleration of the controller itself. In most cases, this works fine for relatively imprecise things like driving, but I'm just a little concerned when there is a lot of precise movement involved (such as in a hand).

However, as I'm thinking about it now, I guess the original idea isn't too bad. The basic solution is that you would have to have a Wiimote mounted on each bone in the simulated hand (one for the palm, 3 for each finger, 2 for the thumb, so 15 Wiimotes for a whole hand). Then for each bone, obtain the angle, then just use simple vector addition to get the relative positions for each of the joints. However, this still leaves you with the quandry that you have no idea where in space your hand is located, or if there is any yaw (left to right twisting), and you're back to needing a static reference point like the IR sensor bar. In other words, you would have a very accurately simulated human hand that would be correct as long as it wasn't accellerating, and it wouldn't let you simulate anything from the wrist-up. If you mounted 2 more Wiimotes to the player (one to the forearm, and one to the bicep), then you could have shoulder-down reproduction, and that would give you some decent control to pick up objects (again, just in a plane, since the Wiimotes could not detect yaw for the arm to turn from right-to-left).

I guess now all we need is some smart-guy to strap about 13 Wiimotes to his body and use the vector addition to make a simple stick-figure of himself dance around on the screen. :) It wouldn't be nearly as accurate as standard motion-capture tools (since the pitch/roll angle calculations are so limited by assuming zero linear accelleration), but it would be accurate enough to make a cool YouTube video and get posted on Slashdot. :)

Re:Wiimote on the PS3?

[c_forq]

the console itself is not that good, it's basically PS-2 generation horsepower and video.

Two nitpicks. One is the PS2 had the lowest horsepower and video of the last generation. Second is I am beginning to suspect this is not quite true. When playing Wii boxing I noticed a few things that make me think the Wii is packing some serious shader power. Next time you play Wii Sports try out boxing, and notice how there are a large number of screens showing what is happening in the ring, notice the lighting on the audience, and notice the sweat, blur, and wave effects that happen while punches are thrown. There are quite a few processes going on there, in addition to the motion sensing, hit detecting, and AI. I think don't think developers have even started to touch the limits of the console, and I think their ceiling is a lot higher than most people think.