I don’t own a Wii (yet) but I bought a Wiimote last week.
Inspired by Yann Seznec’s Wii Loop Machine (which is based on the aka.wiimote Max/MSP object by Masayuki Akamatsu) and Bob Somer’s drum machine, I soon discovered that the Wiimote is compatible with an impressive list of known Bluetooth devices. For Mac users, there’s Darwiin Remote. Windows users may want to check out GlovePIE (along with growing lists of scripts and hacks). GlovePIE seems to be able to map a dazzling variety of inputs to a variety of inputs, including keypresses, mouse pointer, virtual joysticks, as well as both MIDI and OSC. OSC being the sort of handy-dandy glue that lets you get the data into vvvv, Max/MSP, Chuck or whatever else you want. The license is more than a little bit interesting though (“You may not use this software on military bases, or for military purposes, or in Israel…”).
Nothing really exciting to show yet, but using the Wiimote to control everything from existing games to Front Row as well as musical or VJ performances makes me a happy hacker.
What else is going on at the moment? Well, the Wii interface for Second Life sounds interesting (especially once making “avatar navigation a gestural function” is implemented), while Pat Glynn’s Half Life 2 Wiimote mod might be the thing that finally makes me buy HL2.
[CC-licensed photo originally uploaded to Flickr by borghal]
I do like the look of the video showing Darwiinmote being used to navigate Google Earth – do you know whether that code has been released yet?
I belive QuartzComposer was the magic glue used there. Hiroaki has talked about it, but no code (that I’ve seen) yet.
Oh, and GlovePIE users can drive Google Earth on Windows with a WiiMote already I think (though I’ve not tried it)