As of September 2007, Nintendo has sold over 13 million Wii game consoles. This significantly exceeds the number of Tablet PCs in use today according to even the most generous estimates of Tablet PC sales. This makes the Wii Remote one of the most common computer input devices in the world. It also happens to be one of the most sophisticated. It contains a 1024×768 infrared camera with built-in hardware blob tracking of up to 4 points at 100Hz. This significantly out performs any PC “webcam” available today. It also contains a +/-3g 8-bit 3-axis accelerometer also operating at 100Hz and an expandsion port for even more capability. These projects are an effort to explore and demonstrate applications that the millions of Wii Remotes in world readily support.
Tracking Your Fingers with the Wiimote
Using an LED array and some reflective tape, you can use the infrared camera in the Wii remote to track objects, like your fingers, in 2D space. This lets you interact with your computer simply by waving your hands in the air similar to the interaction seen in the movie “Minority Report”. The Wiimote can track upto 4 points simultaneously. The multipoint grid software is a custom C# DirectX program.
Software
To run the grid program you see in the video:
- First, follow this walkthrough on using the wiimote with C#. You may need to download a copy of Visual C# Express to compile/run this sample if you don’t have it yet.
- Download a copy of the DirectX SDK. You may not need this to simply run the sample grid program, but you will need it if you want to make any changes to it.
- Download the Wiimote Multipoint Grid sample program. Make sure your wiimote is connected via bluetooth, and then run the “.exe” shortcut in the main folder.
Thank you for Youtube.com & cs.cmu.edu/~johnny