We all thought Nintendo was going to change the world of gaming when it released the Wii all those years ago. In the end, it was interesting but not really fundamentally life-changing for most of us. In any case, [Sebastian] and [Gabriel] decided to build a Wii-like controller for their microcontroller class at Cornell.
The build uses a pair of Raspberry Pi Pico microcontrollers, communicating over HC-05 Bluetooth modules. One Pico acts as a controller akin to a Wiimote, while the other runs a basic game and displays it on a screen via VGA output. The controller senses motion thanks to a MPU6050 inertial measurement unit, combining both gyros and accelerometers in all three axes.
The duo demonstrate the hardware by using it as a pointer to play a simple Tic-Tac-Toe game. It’s in no way going to light up the Steam charts, but the project page does go into plenty of useful detail on how everything was implemented. If you want to create your own motion gaming controller, you could do worse than reading up on their work.
We’ve seen some other great examples of motion controls put to good use, like this VR bowling game. Video after the break.
I’ve heard of guys that started balding at a very early age, that can’t be pleasant.
Still though, there are baseball caps.
Also, isn’t Cornell one of the places where everybody lost his mind?
You say it didn’t change the world, but the post right after this one is about quadcopter controls. The first affordable multicopters used the wiimote IMU, since its mass-produced volume brought the costs down into experimenter territory for the first time.
I would argue that the explosion in cheap drone availability changed the world more than pretty much any other thing in the last 20 years, vastly beyond mere video games.