Wiimotes have arrived!
This tuesday I ordered them at conrad.be, on thursday the order was confirmed and on friday they arrived!
The batteries were included (thank you Nintendo!), so I could start immediatly with connecting them to my computer. I bought a little program for this, called OSCulator ($ 19). The wiimotes use bluetooth, so they’re wireless up to about ten metres. The total price was € 166 for all four of them.
Why OSCulator? There are indeed some free alternatives, like darwiinremote, Wiiji and Wiinstrument on Mac. But the last two are quickly outruled, Wiiji just simulates a joystick (using the HID specification) and Wiinstrument is only a MIDI instrument where you have to drum with your wiimotes.
The only program that roughly compares to OSCulator is darwiinremote. This takes the raw data of the accelerometers and sends them to other programs using OpenSound Control (OSC). But darwiinremote only supports one or two wiimotes at the same time, and has a lot of other things that just aren’t as good as OSCulator.
But first let me give you an overview of how the accelerometers inside the wiimote work. This image from the OSCulator website explains it perfectly:
The accelerometer is a little chip on the circuitboard of the wiimote and registers just three things: the force that is being exerted on the X-, Y- and Z- axis. If you tilt the wiimote (pitch on the image) it will register a change in force on the Y and Z axis. The wiimote itself doesn’t interpret this as “tilting”, this is done by the wii or the computer.
Darwiinremote only sends that pure accelerometerdata via OSC, while OSCulator does both, the raw data as well as the interpretation of this data. If you tilt the wiimote in the pitch direction, it neatly sends out a value from 0 (aiming down) to 1 (aiming up) for the pitch parameter.
The wiimote also has the infrared camera on board that can track up to 4 IR-leds. The wii uses this to make your wiimote a pointing device, because the motion that can be derived from this is much more precise than what the accelerometer gives you (but the IR-leds have to be in range of the camera all the time). Johnny Chung Lee uses this technique in creating the most of his wiimote hacks. OSCulator can also tell you the location of these leds.
Other advantages of OSCulator are that you can connect up to 6 wiimotes at a time and that the bluetooth connection is much more stable and fluent than darwiinremote, because it uses ‘perfect pairing’ to solve a bug in the bluetooth driver of Mac OS X. OSCulator can also send out midi if you want it to, to easily make the connection to i.e. Ableton Live. It also supports the wii balance board, next to other controllers like the iPhone, Wacom tablets and the Space Navigator.
You can try OSCulator for free, but every few minutes it cuts your signal feed with a nagging screen to remind you that you didn’t pay yet. Luckily, it’s pretty cheap.
Anyway, that’s it for now. I’m now going to write a processing sketch to investigate the wiimote-data. Stay tuned!
This entry was posted on Monday, March 16th, 2009 at 13:50 and is filed under Thesis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.