Wii Hacks – Cool Things You Can Do With Your WiiMote
You may just think of the Wii Remote, or WiiMote, is just a revolutionary new way to play video games but it also opens up all sorts of new possibilities outside of video gaming. For an example we have the "WiigoBot, a Lego Robot specially designed to hold the WiiMote in the upright position and flick it at the right moment in Wii Bowling. With this you can bowl a perfect game without physically playing! One may wonder why someone would want to do this and the answer, almost certainly, is because they can.
Another, perhaps more useful and practical example is by reconfiguring your WiiMote to work as a computer mouse. You can find plenty of video tutorials showing how to do this online.
I think the most ingenious uses of the Wii that we have seen so far have been devised by Johnny Lee, formerly of Carnegie Mellon University and now employed by Microsoft. His contributions have include an interactive whiteboard and "head-tracking technology" to see a video presentation of this click.. wii whiteboard.
This incredible interactive whiteboard requires only a WiiMote, a Bluetooth connection for your computer, and an LED pen. The reason that these few items can achieve this magic is down to the WiiMote which contains a fairly high quality infrared camera. The result of these experiments was a whiteboard that is truly interactive. One can "draw" on it, or even move or shrink portions of it as in the film Minority Report and Lee makes the software that you need to drive it freely available on his website.
Now, Lee's head-tracking technology is another example of someone using their knowledge of what is required together with an understanding of the clever technology the wii console uses. I doubt very much that the original developers ever conceived an idea like this or I feel sure they would have developed it as part of the wii bundle you buy. Lee has discovered a method for making a television display interactive with the movement of an individual person.
Making the discovery of this effect he described it as similar to the sensation of looking out a window. When you move to the left or to the right while peering out of a window, your field of vision changes. The closer you get to the window, the wider the area you see. Lee's adaptation of the WiiMote technology provides interesting possibilities for Nintendo Wii game developers and perhaps other applications as well. It opens up a whole new area of gaming for Nintendo and no doubt they will make good use of it.
The head-tracking technology works for reasons similar to the factors that make the interactive whiteboard possible. Since the WiiMote contains an infrared camera, all you have to do is place the WiiMote in front of the television and pointed toward the room, and the gamer must wear a device that mimics the sensor bar. Lee found the simplest way of doing this is by retrofitting safety glasses with LED sensors on each side which enables the interactive experience that could take future video gaming to a new level.
The WiiMote contains the possibilities for so many new applications in business, scientific research, and of course gaming. We can expect to see a whole new generation of interactive games and applications in the future. Who knows what new uses developers and researchers will come up with, next. These WiiMote hacks show how relatively inexpensive technology can replace applications costing hundreds or even thousands of dollars and manage to do 90% of what the more expensive technology is capable of achieving.
Wii Gadgets
What else can you do with a wii other than play games. You will be surprised as I was to see this demo of how you can use a wii controller to make a digital whiteboard that would cost thousands of dollars.
