TEDTalk Tuesday: A New Application for the Wiimote

[Occulus]

This week's TEDTALKTUESDAY comes to us from a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, who- among other things- has developed a new and very useful way to apply the technology behind Nintendo's wiimote ("wow" moments in the video provided, as always, free of charge).

Enjoy!

JOHNNYLEE

Talk Title: Creating tech marvels out of a $40 Wii Remote (Video runtime: 5:40)



Johnny Lee

TED Bio

About this Talk

Johnny Lee demos his amazing Wii Remote hacks, which transform the $40 game piece into a digital whiteboard, a touchscreen and a head-mounted 3-D viewer. A multi-ovation demo from TED2008.

[SidDithers]

1. K&R...this is fantastic...

thanks for posting.

:applause:

Sid

[Greyskye]

2. That was amazing.

I'm looking forward to this technology going mainstream!

Thanks for posting this.

[Xithras]

3. The interactive whiteboard leaves a bit to be desired, but the 3D is cool.

He makes the statement at one point that it's "80% of the functionality for about 50% of the cost". That, sadly, is very untrue. It's about 25% of the functionality for 1% of the cost. Most new interactive whiteboard systems don't require pens any longer and simply work on touch. Pens are only used when high fidelity writing or drawing is required, and even then they offer multiple colors etc. I have one down the hall, and we play chess on it every day during lunch. It's an insanely cool piece of tech, but the whiteboard in this video doesn't even compare.

The 3D hack was very cool, and was ingenious in its simplicity. You have to wonder why nobody has thought of it before.

[Occulus]

4. Well, I did see him do multitouch

and on a display not optimized for multitouch. That alone is pretty impressive.

Does one require a Wii to do this, or just the wiimote? He wasn't real clear on that.

You're absolutely correct- the 3D head tracking seems like a complete no-brainer.You heard what he said, though; EA is going to put support fot that on one if its easter eggs for an upcoming game (don't know which, say sorry to ya).

I wonder if it's possible to use the multitouch system with Blender...

[Xithras]

5. Actually I can answer that for you.

The Wiimote combines a high resolution infrared camera with a couple of accelerometers, and communicates via Bluetooth. You don't need a Wii to do any of this...any Bluetooth enabled computer can communicate with one IF you have the savvy to write an interface program.

This guy didn't actually invent this all himself. Computer geeks started hacking on the Wii shortly after it was released a couple of years ago, and it only took a few months for some guy to map out all of the Wiimote's Bluetooth signalling. He wrote and released a chunk of code that allowed other coders to develop apps without having to deal with the details of the Wiimote itself. Since then, dozens of programs have been released by hackers goofing around with the hardware. You can use the Wiimote to trigger security cameras, as a mouse, to control R/C cars, and all sorts of neat things. The guy in the video probably has the most well developed applications out at the moment, but he's far from the only one messing around with this.

As for Blender, the problem is that the application itself only supports a single pointer. You'll need the MPX driver to add multiple pointer support to X Server, which would add general multitouch support to the UI, but Blender itself cannot handle multiple inputs. My guess it that it won't happen until 2.5.