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Head Tracking w/ the Wiimote
mrneutron2003 writes "This guy just doesn't know when to stop. Johnny Chung Lee graces us with yet another one of his inventive Wiimote projects. This time it involves using the Wiimote and a pair of inexpensive LED safety goggles (with the standard LED's replaced with InfraRed ones) to allow positional head tracking , achieving an effect similar to what is experienced with three dimensional displays and CAVE systems. The video dramatically illustrates the effect. Game developers take note. This simple little variation on infrared tracking could allow for some seriously immersive gameplay in the future." This guy deserves a medal.
Surely he's sent in his resume. That's some really cool concepting, and not that Nintendo doesn't have their own cool concepts, but this is just incredible. The best part is, it's really simple and appears to be mass producible for cheap - two things Nintendo does well already.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
The youtube video on the linked site comes up as unavailable, but the one actually on the youtube site seems to work. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw Cool stuff.
Is it just me (and my girlfriend), or does this guy sound a lot like Kermit the Frog?
Also, the head tracking is awesome.
adventure-today.com
Headtracking for games has been around for a long time but this solution really takes the cake for using inexpensive, off the shelf technology..
The TrackIR solution linked above costs around as much as a Wii itself.
The system in the helicopter is in no way "similar" except from the fact that it used head tracking. Head-tracking helmets have been used for aiming weapons in aircraft for quite sime time now. Mass-application of the concept originates from Soviet fighter planes, MiG-29 being the most notable example.
Between those things and multi-touch, I am literally waiting for a revolution of computer input design. 10 years ago, there was the movement, but not the technology. Today we have the technology. Please, give us some games that use this, give us multitouch tablet Macs (sorry windos fanboys, microsoft could pull it off technologically, but it wouldn't be useable), give me a VR multitouch table! Now! The flying car can wait until next year...
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Give this man a consulting job!!!
Nintendo, are you listening?
from the this-is-just-to-cool dept.
You spelled 'too' wrong.
Honesty may be the best policy, but by process of elimination, dishonesty is the second best policy.
Why the Wii isn't for "serious" gamers? Who needs 1080p when you've got this?
Combine this with the weight-shifting capability of the Fit, and you've got an immersive gaming experience that's second only to the holodeck.
So. Freaking. Cool.
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
Not very.
Not to trivialise what Johnny is doing there is basically measuring the position of the wiimote in relation to the sensor bar - something it already does. The code to do this shouldn't be that difficult. The true genius was in him realising that you could do this easiest by reversing the moving component and the stationary component.
Apart from some smoothing algorithms, this is no more complex than reading the wiimote's pointer position and mapping that to a camera viewpoint.
Correct. As far as the rendering engine is concerned, whether you're moving the camera with your head or a mouse, it's all pretty much the same. This guy is probably using a PC instead of the Wii because it's much easier to get code running on a PC than a Wii (you don't need Nintendo's SDK), which makes it cheaper and more useful to share the code with others.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
Which is the whole beauty of it! The second thing I thought when watching the video was whether I could possible create a small game around that concept (I'm a hobbyist game developer).
It's so simple that you can do something with it, without having to wait for IBM, or Nintendo or any other big-$$$ company to bring out the relevant hardware in maybe 5 years.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
What is interesting is that he's coming up with some very creative ideas, and giving them away for free.
This will likely spur an avalanche of Wii hacks, and could easily cause wiimote sales to go thru the roof..
I'm totally enjoying the adventure Johnny!
Bavarian Purity Law of Rice Krispie Squares: Rice Krispies, Marshmallows, Butter, Vanilla.
from my understanding, the limit is imposed by the bandwidth-per-point transmitted over bluetooth, and not the onboard image processing on the wiimote.
How about three WII remotes together... you'd have a virtual room you could write on and move things around with your fingers?
As I understand it, the infrared detector on the Wii remote is basically a camera with an IR filter in front of it.
Potentially you could just use a webcam with an IR filter in front of it instead of a Wii remote.
Note: 1) there is usually a filter to filter out IR inside most webcams, so that would have to be removed. 2) IR emitter tracking would have to be done on the PC instead of inside the Wii remote.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_of_Columbus P.
Alas, shutter glasses(a polarized screen with an LCD shutter) and cross-polarized glasses don't play with LCD displays, because LCD uses polarization to turn the pixels on and off. LCD latencies are also a little high for shutter glasses.
... an no-one is going to build the latter until there are plenty of mainstream 3D apps to support the market.
They only work with DLP projectors (uses little mirrors), CRTs, plasma, and upcoming display technologies like Field Effect Displays and LED displays. Obviously there are a lot of display technologies that do work there, but LCD is a very popular technology for widescreen TV and of course, for PC monitors.
Either way you do it, you also have to double the grunt of your rendering system (or half your graphical complexity), and you need specific software support to get it right (you can go a long way with a driver that knows it's rendering for stereoscopy and just produces the correct eye POVs, but the glitches you get in the foreground and HUD are only tolerated by enthusiasts.). With shuttering you need glasses. With cross polarization you need to double the number of display elements (by having two displays or a special display with double the horizontal resolutions). Used in POV applications, all of these technologies are a one-user gig.
Stereo "Wii-D" will probably never happen ; half the audience have an incompatible display device, the system does not have an enormous excess of GPU grunt. Stereo3D would only be common with one of the following display devices...
* Personal head-mounted 3D display (probably VRD goggles)
* Large area wide aspect flatpanel displays with inherent stereo 3D support built in at the factory (which means basically doubling the vertical rez and making a special polarized filter for the screen).
The parallax effect that Johnny Lee demonstrates conveniently exploits the tendency of the human brain to "fill in the gaps" ; I'd be intrigued to see how convincing it really is.
As another poster points out, head tracking really isn't very well received for the PC, because the PC is an inherently static device. You can move your head, but your hands have to remain fixated on the keyboard / mouse. The Wii has an advantage here because the input device moves around with you. Several times during Zelda I got up from my chair and started moving almost involuntarily, my whole body was immersed in the game. I would never have tried that on the PC ; when I feel the urge there it probably just contributes to my neck tension.
If the static, 3rd person POV of Zelda can make this gamer rise up and move, a game armed with a head tracking linked POV would be compulsively immersive, even without stereoscopic 3D.
An I the only one who thought of this when I read the title:
http://www.thinkgeek.com/stuff/41/wiihelm.shtml
Ramen
Holy shit that was awesome, why is this guy not employed somewhere they can give hive lots of money? If I were in a gaming department for the next XBOX360 flight game or something, I would hire this dude and give him as much money as he needed to make potential customers feel as if they were inside a frigging airplane lol man that was sweet looking.
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Just thought of this. This would be a wicked interface, and much more natural, for someone piloting a drone helicopter or even robotic vehicle.
If you had several monitors, this could be used to make them feel as if they were an actual "pilots seat" of a vehicle giving perfect perspective to the "pilot" because they know where the head is oriented and each monitor could produce the proper peripheral and image views for the "pilot"
It would take a little tricky camera work for the robotic vehicle, but I am sure gratuitous funding could solve those problems.
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Nahhhhh bandwidth isn't that limited.
Remember the core wiimote can handle an additional nunchuck or the classic controller, each of which requires more data than the small amount of data per frame required.
If Nintendo wanted to do this anyway I believe they would use a custom device with its own interface (and would almost certainly retain the power connection the current sensor bar uses).
There has been rumour that the next wii will be controller less, people simply acting out the actions to get results.
This will be done via sophisticated processing of a normal image and not be limited to having to stick baubles onto our bodies.
Having said that I am fascinated by this technology and find his 'hacks' amazing.
liqbase
He says this is only good for one player at a time.. if the Wii remote was able to map other colors to other players, it'd be able to handle different players for each window in a split-screen game, no?
I've also used webcams as input to capture motion and patterns, the biggest problem with this solution is the refresh rate, which sucks. On the contrary, the wiimote has a much faster refresh rate, which gives you a smoother reponse improving the usability. Citing to Chung Lee ..."It contains a 1024x768 infrared camera with built-in hardware blob tracking of up to 4 points at 100Hz. This significantly out performs any PC "webcam" available today."...
I'm an almost-hobbyist (time constraints, ugh!) game developer and I've already thought of 2 games I want to play since I saw the video this morning. I usually suck at ideas. This this is ripe for the plucking.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
You dumbass, the link you pointed at is making use of the accelerometers, not the IR cam. It must rock to be too stupid to know how pointless your input is.
"Old man yells at systemd"