Dawn of the Geeks

One of the early mistakes people made in understanding how the Wii works was thinking that the Wii Sensor Bar actually did anything. After all it plugged into the Wii with what looks like a USB cable and you must have it on or the Wii Remote doesn’t work. Turns out that it’s essentially just a flashlight with infrared LEDs. You can put two candles on top of your TV and play the Wii.

The second misconception seems to revolve around what the Wii Remote actually does. I e-mailed Brian Peek who wrote the Managed Wiimote Library and he was apparently unaware that there was anything missing in his library. He was under the impression (as are a lot of people) that the points returned by the Wiimote for the infrared sensors indicate where the Wiimote is pointing. He didn’t realize that you can’t use those values by themselves to use the Wiimote as a pointing device.

It appears to work in some cases but once you start rotating the Wiimote (you know, twisting your wrist) things don’t work anymore.

Those values are actually where the infrared points appear in the camera. They do not by themselves indicate where the wiimote is actually pointing.

There’s a very good reason for that: the Wiimote is a collection of sensors that reports back the raw data to the Wii. It is not a computer. The individual sensors are not communicating with each other. The camera finds the x and y coordinates of its light sensor that are activated by the infrared light that hits it. The accelerometers measure their respective g-forces. There is also circuitry that indicates what buttons are being pressed. All of those parts feed their data into a bluetooth transmitter.

The reason that the Wiimote is not doing calculations is because it would add additional cost to the controller for no good reason since there is a perfectly good computer sitting on your entertainment center. All that raw data is feed to the Wii and the Wii crunches the data and spits out usable information that games can make use of. The Wii takes the positions of the infrared points of light that the camera sees and combines it with the data from the accelerometers and generates the X and Y coordinate indicating where on the screen the controller is pointing.

If the remote were to do that it would require some sort of CPU and memory and custom software, etc. As it is the Wiimote is not a programmable device. All it does is take data from the sensors and feed it through a bluetooth transmitter for more sophisticated hardware to deal with. It’s genius in its simplicity.

Anyway, the point is that the Managed Library is a great start but like the Wiimote, it only gets you the raw data. You still have to do calculations to realize the full potential of that data. The biggest missing piece is being able to use the Wiimote as a pointing device. I’ve got a good start on that as I’ve mentioned in previous posts. I’ve started work incorporating my pointer code into an XNA project to create a few sample games using the Wiimote as the pointing device.

Yes, that’s right, I’m using a game programming library intended to be used to create XBox games to create Wiimote based games. My software rendering library I wrote from scratch is nice and all and is fun to work with but it’s not going to cut it for making the types of games I want to create now that I can make better use of the Wiimote.

Hopefully I’ll have a release of some games this weekend. The games I’m currently working on are designed for a 21 month old. Perfect for demoing the capabilities of my Wiimote code without burying it under complex game code.