BodySurf — Audiosurf Meets the Wii Balance Board

Chardish writes "Forget the hype about Wii Fit — the coolest thing about the Wii Balance Board is its potential as a game controller, and what better way to christen a new peripheral than by rigging it to work with games that predate the peripheral's existence? BodySurf is a (somewhat lengthy) GlovePIE script that manipulates the input of the Balance Board to work with the PC music game Audiosurf. It's fairly sophisticated, and includes Wiimote motion controls, special controls for each character, weight calibration, and a few play options."

Comments

Balance board as a controller..

[somersault]

I actually thought the balance board was rather counter intuitive as a controller, for certain things at least. For example when you are ski-ing or snowboarding, sure you have to balance (though if you are able to stand still in a certain position without falling over I'd say you were balanced okay), but your direction of movement is largely decided by the angle of your skis/board rather than where your center of gravity is - if you get your center of gravity in the wrong place you'd fall over sure, but your board or skis would be going in the direction that your feet had them carving. I found myself trying to push down on the board with my feet a lot more than just shifting my balance. Or I'd move my head but leave my center of gravity where it was for example. I've only used one for about half an hour, and I was getting used to just shifting my center of gravity around instead of doing anything else by the end, but I think it's a rather awkward control system in and of itself. Combined with other methods of input it could have some novel uses though..

It also predicted my body age as 33 which I was a bit miffed about, as I think my balance is pretty good. I was doing a lot of martial arts last year and still have noticeably better balance when standing on one foot than the years prior (I'd done a bit of martial arts when I was in primary school too but over the years my ankle strength and balance ability relative to my body mass obviously dropped off a bit!), though perhaps I tend to wave around a bit when I'm standing on both feet..

Re:But is it fun?

[Chyeld]

Given it looks like a direct analog to the Soccer game in Wii Fit (dodging objects/heading balls = avoiding and hitting blocks), I'd have to assume that it would be alot of fun. I spend most of my fitness credits in the balance games (mostly because I need to work on mine).