This is my second transcription, about amazing things with the wii remote… !
Hi. My name is Johnny Lee and I’m gonna show you how to create a cheap electronic whiteboard system, using the Nintendo Wii remote. Now, just like my other video on tracking your fingers using the wiimote, this project is also only going to use the infrared camera, built in to the front of each controller. This camera is sensitive only to sources of infrared light, which is why you can track things like the Nintendo sensor bar, light bulbs or candles. So if we wanna track pens on an electronic whiteboard, all you have to do is create pens that emit infrared light. The light pen is composed of an infrared LED, a push one the switch and a connection to a power supply which could easily be a battery. When you push the button, the LED turns on. This is basically an LED flash light in a pen from factory.
If you wanna make one for yourself, you just start of with a … from a normal ink pen and then glue in your components. Now behind me, is a projected image of my computer. Now if I want to interact with that image with my light pens, I have to make sure that the Wii remote can always see the tip of the pen. To do this, I have to put the Wiimote off to the side so I don’t block its view when I’m in front of the projected image. I have made this little stand for my Wiimote, but you can use any material that you have around the house to pop it up on the right orientation. Now when I put it on the shelf, I have to make sure it’s pointed at the screen so it can see the whole area. Now it’s important to remember that the Wiimote has a field of the view about 45 degrees. So make sure your back far enough to see the more screen but not too far back, cause otherwise you lose tracking resolution. Once I connect the Wiimote to the computer Bluetooth, I can do a standing 4 point touch calibration like they do on most electronic whiteboards. What this does is it maps, the camera coordinates to the projector coordinates and now the cursor will show up wherever my pen is, and I can simulate a mouse, or draw in a drawing program or manipulate my windows.
One nice thing about using the Wiimote to do this, is any surface I can project onto, I can basically turn it into an interactive whiteboard. Now what I have here is a projector mounted onto a tripod which is kind of a generally useful thing to do anyway. And its now pointing at this table top, and the Wiimote is actually attached to the projector so we can have this top-down view of this display. Again, after I do the four point touch calibration, I can now use my pen just like a mouse, and I can interact with my table like it’s a multi thousand dollar interactive whiteboard. Additionally, because the wii remote can track up to four points simultaneously we use two pens. This is actually a multi touch interactive system.
If you don’t happen to have a projector, you can still use the same technique with a liquid crystal display. You simply mount the Wii remote, point it at the display, and then do our 4 four point touch calibration. Now, we can essentially turn any liquid crystal display into a multi touch tablet surface.
So that’s how with a Nintendo Wiimote and some infrared LED light pens you can created your own really low-cost multi touch interactive whiteboard system or multi touch tablet PC. Now, in truth, the tracking resolution you’re gonna get of the camera is not gonna be as good as one of the commercial products but it’s pretty good, and it’s much much cheaper. So I hope you’ve enjoyed this video and if you like to try the software, you can go to my website and download the copy and try it for yourself. Thanks for watching.
