2008-2009-Wii View

WiiView

by Jan Kazemier and Yuri Meiburg

What we tried to achieve with WiiView is to develop a new and easy to use method to control a PC (to a certain degree). In this case we have limited ourselves to the controlling of an image application, so one could browse through images and execute some basic commands like rotation with head movements. We have used glasses containing four infrared LEDs, and a WiiMote to track the points (hence the name WiiView). The program uses the center of those points as some kind of mouse to activate different actions. The menu in which this »mouse« is used is shown on the right.

The center area is the only square in which you do not want to program any action. This square is meant for the »neutral« position of the head. When you move your head in to any of the other squares, a simple timing measurement will start. If you stay in that area for an X amount of time (variable), it registers it as some kind of mouse click and thus executes an action. While this may seem very hard to control, as soon as there is some form of feedback (in our case the location of our pointer), it appears to be very intuitive. As the head is usually quite accurate in its movements (in contrast to for example moving your hand) we were able to set the boundaries of the squares pretty »tight«—meaning in this case that you only need to move your head a little bit to perform the desired action—while still excluding almost all unwanted actions due to noise or unwanted movements. The video below demonstrates the technique.