The Wii Remote, sometimes nicknamed “Wiimote”, is the primary controller for Nintendo’s Wii console. A main feature of the Wii Remote is its motion sensing capability, which allows the user to interact with and manipulate items on screen via movement and pointing through the use of accelerometer and optical sensor technology. Another feature is its expandability through the use of attachments.
The Wii Remote was announced at the Tokyo Game Show on September 16, 2005. It has since received much attention due to its unique features and the contrast between it and typical gaming controllers. It has also gained significant attention from hackers using it to control non Wii-related devices through Wii homebrew.
Using the infrared camera in the Wii remote and a head mounted sensor bar (two IR LEDs), you can accurately track the location of your head and render view dependent images on the screen. This effectively transforms your display into a portal to a virtual environment. The display properly reacts to head and body movement as if it were a real window creating a realistic illusion of depth and space.
The program only needs to know your display size and the size of your sensor bar. The software is a custom C# DirectX program and is primarily provided as sample code for developers without support or additional documentation. You may need the most recent version of DirectX installed for this to work.
Software
To run the DesktopVR program you see in the video:
- Connect your wiimote to your PC via Bluetooth. You can set up and connect to your Wiimote with BlueSoleil by these steps (or follow this tutorial).
- First, start up the BlueSoleil software and activate your Bluetooth adapters if needed.
- Then hit the 1+2 buttons on your Wiimote and click the center orange circle. It will take a few seconds and then find it.
- Make sure that the 4 LEDs on the bottom of the Wiimote are blinking during this whole process. Since the Wiimotes only stay on discover mode for several seconds, you can either hold down the 1+2 buttons the whole time or press them every few seconds.
- If BlueSoleil does not detect your Wiimote, Unplug your bluetooth device and plug it back in. Then press the center orange circle and try again.
- Right click the Wiimote (NINTENDO-RVT-CNT-01) that shows up and click Refresh Services.
- Should this not work, press 1+2 on the Wiimote and simply click on the Wiimote’s icon in BlueSoleil.
- Click the Bluetooth HID button that shows up at the top and you are done! Now you can use your Wiimote with programs such as GlovePIE and WiinRemote.
- Download the WiiDesktopVR sample program. Read the README file on program usage and configuration. Launch the “WiiDesktopVR.exe” in the main folder. A potentially more stable/Vista/64-bit compatible version has been created by Andrea Leganza. There also may be more variants on the web.
Developers Notes: The code is built on top of this Wiimote library. To compile the program, you will need a C# IDE and the DirectX SDK. More notes are in the README.
Thank you for Youtube.com, Wikipedia.org & cs.cmu.edu/~johnny