Progression

Getting the Wiimote recognized on a windows machine was an interesting experience, let's just leave it at that. Then, after much work trying to get the tk.wii patch I gained some success only to realize that calculation of the angle of the points the Wiimote is tracking is not provided. In fact, the Wiimote in it's intended usage never uses the IR leds as a reference for rotation. Doh! This is all done through use of the accelerometers which makes sense...if you're moving the Wiimote. Since I'm interested in moving the actual leds and the tk.wii patch provides no data concerning the position of each point being tracked I had to look elsewhere.

I just happened to be trying out the GlovePIE application (for programmable input emulation) with the Wiimote to see what functionality it had when I came across documentation about how to get the individual point data I needed. Not only that, it could provide the size of the points being tracked which could also be useful. Nasty! From there it was just some simple trig to find the angle between the two points. Handily enough, GlovePIE supports the same OSC protocol that Max also has externals for, so getting the data into max isn't a problem.


Now that I have the angle of the LED's piping into max, the data is playing nicely with the panhandler patch which allows setting the rotation of a sound source.


Everything seems to be working as intended. Now it's a matter of selecting sounds and deciding how to manipulate them so I can start on a more solid implementation. Speaking of which, I made a special hat for head tracking. It's mostly for looking cool but it's going to help with development a lot.