Magic Wands For Disney

May 17, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 13 Comments

[NRP] sent us a few of his projects. The most notable of the bunch was a school project funded by Disney. They were to make some kind of interactive entertainment for people waiting in line for rides. They decided on a wand style interface. Each wand has an accelerometer, an IR LED for tracking, an XBee unit, and a few buttons for interaction. They wrote some custom games and a multi person white board to test it all out. You can see those in action, along with a space themed pong game in the video after the break. Even though this was funded by Disney, you can still find all the source code and schematics, available for free.

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Wiitar, A Build Log

April 17, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 13 Comments

wiitar

[Ozan] sent in this build log from when he made a Wiitar. As you can probably guess from the title, it’s a guitar combined with a wiimote. He has completely gutted the Wiimote and installed the internals in the guitar. Some toggle switches were mounted to control the button states on the Wiimote. This is a pretty useful setup as you can use the Wiimote data to control effects on the guitar. We’ve actually seen a very similar setup before. [Ozan] has included the build log, as well as a simple glovepie script and a sample effect patch.

Wiimote Controlled Hexapods

April 5, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 8 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsBj7koZ9lk]

The Phoenix is a very impressive hexapod robot platform. It has 18 servos which gives each leg 3 degrees of freedom and a BasicAtom Pro 28 for the brains. Interestingly, the design started as a personal project of a forum member on the Lynxmotion forums. It turned out so well, it has become an actual product. We’ve seen videos of these before and they always have some pretty fluid and organic seeming motion. They seem almost alive in this configuration. The only thing that might make them scarier would be to add Lou Vega’s decapitated head, well maybe that plus some really nice face tracking. In the video above, you can see where someone paired one up with a Wiimote for a pretty intuitive control scheme. Yeah, we realize the video is nearly a year old, how did we miss this one? You can see a video of it walking around after the break, and another controlled by a ps2 controller.

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Augmented FPS Gaming

February 6, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 14 Comments

aug

[MikeFez] sent in this info about his augmented FPS set ups. He started this project back with an original XBox in 2006. He wanted a more immersive way of interacting with his games. Pointing out that gaming visuals and interactivity have come leaps and bounds while the controllers themselves have basically just added a few buttons, he explains his goals. He wanted to have to move his body to move his character and possibly physically aim. The original project, for the XBox, was successful in that he used a floor pad to control his character. Since then, the Wii has come out and he has moved to the PC as his main platform. As expected, he is now using the Wiimote as the aiming device.

Pseudo 3D Chat

January 29, 2009 by Eliot 21 Comments

3d_video-conference

[Chris Harrison] and [Scott E. Hudson] have built a novel system for faking a 3D video chat session. Their implementation separates the image of the chat participant from the background. They then dynamically reposition the video based on the movement of the viewers head. Their using the OpenCV library to do facial recognition (just like the Laughing Man demo). The 3D effect is very similar to what you see in [Johnny Lee]’s Wiimote headtracking. A video of the pseudo 3D chat is embedded below.

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The Segwii

January 29, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 8 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYUm3V1NSAM&eurl=http://segwii.com/]

The Segwii is a self balancing robot. Yes, another one, only this one can be controlled via WiiMote. The Segwii can function in stand alone mode, which offers only the ability to balance, or it can be tethered. When tethered via USB to the laptop, it can be remotely controlled using the WiiMote through processing. Sadly, the video above doesn’t show any WiiMote action. Lets hope they continue the work to incorporate a direct bluetooth connection to the bot.

This one seems to be pretty sturdy, though he does mention that temperature changes can throw off the internal gyroscope. This one seems to be similar to the Arduway in terms of how smoothly it keeps balance. The miniature balancing robot has them both beat for pure goofyness though.

Portable Wii

January 27, 2009 by Strom Carlson 32 Comments

portablewii

Not content with Nintendo’s current portable video game offerings, fifteen year old hardware hacker [Xteaphn] (pronounced “Steven”) has come up with a series of hardware modifications to make a battery-operated Wii console. The hacked console features a folding laptop-like screen, which apparently includes the IR emitters necessary to make the Wiimote operate properly, as well as a set of tiny stereo speakers. To show how tiny the modified console is, [Xteaphn] provides size comparisons with thirteen- and fifteen-inch laptops as well as with a classic Nintendo Game Boy. The only potential hindrance to its long-term durability, as best as we can tell from the video, is that the battery pack and its associated connecting wires hang crudely off the back of the console like a sort of electric colostomy bag.

Check out [Xteaphn]’s YouTube video after the break.

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