selectparks - First Wii-Mote on PC homebrew surfaces

Recently I wrote about the console hacking talk at the 23C3 in Berlin. The article recounts Felix's fine suggestion that a Wii-Mote and a PC is all you need to explore developing interactive content along the lines of what you see on the console itself.

With typically good timing, Chris O'Shea writes with a fine link exposing the internals of the Wii-Mote, just to demystify the whole interface further.

Aside from the obvious cultural kudos granted by using a Wii-Mote in your art project, it's worth mentioning that the Wii-mote isn't new technology in itself. What it is however is perhaps the first economically sane intersection of several technologies many performance artists/musicians have been using for a while: Accelerometers and a couple of IR sensors used for positioning. The fact it's a bluetooth device also makes it far more accessible to those of us that don't want to D.I.Y an interface between the sensors and a machine, especially now that several tookits are now surfacing that do alot of the technical groundwork.

That said, if you're prone to a healthy bout of the N.I.H syndrome, and want to build your own super Wii-Mote, you could avoid bluetooth altogether and go wireless. That'll give you far more range than a bluetooth device ever will. Good luck with capturing positional info with IR over that range though; albeit not necessary if gesture is your primary control data..

Chris also points us to a super YouTube clip of a WiiPC interface aptly called WiiSticks that really exploits the accelerometers to a maximum as a function of play.

While we're at it, here's another YT clip showing how the Wii can be used to navigate a Linux desktop machine. Note the candles in the foreground which he seems to be using as InfraRed emitters so he can get that positional data. The API they're using for this demo is here.

Cheers Chris!