Joe Pietruch's Blog

As my final project for Physical Computing, I created a simple Flash game that uses the Nintendo Wiimote (four of them, actually) as an input device. The screen shows a grid of squares. Each Wiimote is associated with a color, and players point and press buttons to flip the squares to their individual colors. Whichever player has the most squares of his color at the end of the game wins.

It was interesting to work on this project because of the multi-user aspects. Handles for the different user actions needed to be abstracted so as to be associated with different users.  I also created two sets of handles so I could choose between Wiimote and mouse control when debugging – rather than having to hook up the Wiimote every time – and for systems at school where I don’t have privileges to install a bluetooth stack willy-nilly.

This project also served as a testbed for future interactions. Working with the Wiimote as a user input device for the RIT Collaboritorium project  is more pheasible now. I created a set of four different IR beacons to be centered underneath each screen of the DOME. The IR beacons serve as anchors so the Wiimote knows which way it is pointing, and also (because each one is different) at which screen it is pointing. The pointing gesture is not literal, but suffices enough to trick the user into being happy.

Single-Player Mouseable Tile Game