Technical Progression

As of now various hardware bits are on their way in order to make this project a reality. Making their way to my house are a set of speakers, a wiimote, a bluetooth adapter, some infrared leds and some AA battery holders. This didn't put me out too bad considering I was in need of speakers anyway.

In practice the use of the wiimote with max/msp should not present too much of a problem. Masayuki Akamatsu's aka.wiiremote patch will handle interpretation of data streaming from the wiimote. There is plenty of support for this.

This rotational data from the wiimote can be fed into any number of multi-point panning patches that I've come across. The best I've found so far is Michael Zbyszynski's Panhandler~ patch which in conjunction with the VBAP object makes setting up multiple outputs and panning a sound through them pretty painless.

All of this gives me a pretty good start on the actual implementation of the back end of the project. The only real complications may come from trying to manipulate the sound in a customized manner that does not involve simply following the user directly. Some other ideas that I'm toying with that will complicate things (yay) include 3D panning of sound, ie an additional speaker above the person which will allow tilting of their head to correspond to alterations in the panning. Also, I'm very interested in allowing the user to effect the actual audio indirectly through the nature of their movements in order to add another layer of interactivity and weirdness to the project.