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Please Hack the Wiimote for PC Use
Comments(3)
Check out these videos of people using the Nintendo Wii. Looks very cool. Here’s a family with two little kids trying it together. I could see trying that with my boys.
I’m actually tempted to buy the thing – supposedly it’s $250, although I’ve only seen it in bundles costing > $600 and it seems to be sold out right now.
But I’m more excited about hacking this. Not the Nintendo to try to get free games (although surely somebody will do that too), but hacking on the Wiimote. I want to hook it up to a PC and be able to program to it.
Writing games is getting easier. Given a library that encapsulates the Wiimote controller, you could open it up a to a world of hacking on innovative interfaces.
Anyway, I’m excited about cheap, defacto-standardized, fairly accurate motion sensing being unleashed on the world. It’s about time we had something new in mass-market human-computer interfaces.
So somebody please hack it, release the interface, wrap it up in Python, and let the fun begin!
UPDATE:Â It’s hacked! Windows drivers are now available.
I’ve seen some similar products from a company called Gyration. They make remotes, mice, and keyboards, all of which allow handheld usage without a surface….motion sensing and fun buttons are all included. I’ve been tempted to get one of their remote/keyboard bundles for a Home Media Center.
Using it as a remote for a media center is exactly the type of thing I had in mind.
The Gyration production might be very nice, but the Nintendo device will soon be ubiquitous. It’ll be cheap and widely available, meaning many people will be able to hack on it, and a far larger number will be able to use the hacks. Gyration hacking will be a very limited audience (as it is now), whereas Wiimote hacking will potentially be mass-market.
The difference is Gyration products aren’t likely to get a Cease&Desist from Nintendo, which I can see being likely to happen for any decent computer drivers, whatever the OS.