Hi!

Has anyone actually tried to use a Wiimote for detecting touches (using FTIR principle)? I’ve read some discussions here and there in the forums but couldn’t find any actual experience-report…

The reason I’m asking: I build a small prototype (acryl-plate: 20cm x 20cm, 10mm thick; LEDs: 20 x Osram SFH485) and intended to use the Wiimote I already own instead of a cam, which I had to by first.
Result: No touches are detected by the Wiimote. Now I’m curious to know whether the problem is with the Wiimote or another part of my setup.

Any help is highly appreciated! Thanks in advance and best regards,
Markus

PS: There is one thing that makes be believe it’s Wiimotes “fault”: I’ve read here in the forums that a cam (with its IR-filter removed) will show an image completely flooded with white when pointed directly towards an IR-LED - but that is definitely not the case with the Wiimote: consider that it must be able to distinguish between single IR-spots!
So I can imagine that there is also some sort of filtering going on there to suppress anything but the real hot-spots… Any thoughts on this?

yes i play whit my mac but i will try the tracking experiment

i think your blobs just won’t be bright enough, but see what you can do! i know johnny lee’s vids show him either with an LED in direct view of the camera, or an flood of IR light plus super-bright tinfoil or something as a reflector… essentially, i believe the computer vision algo in the wii remote is tuned for single, bright dots. best of luck! oh! and a maximum of 4 dots.

Thank you for your kind (and quick!) answers!

ok, in between I went to the local hardware-store and purchased a webcam, removed the IR-filter and tried it with that: works seamlessly (very bringt touch-spots - thanks to those many, many LED considering how small the surface is)

my (jump to ^_^) conclusion: The Wiimote is probably not suited for this use-case. As th0m said: it seems to work only with single very bright dots…

markintosh, I’m looking forward to hear from your results

I’ve tried this with my FTIR too, the blobs just aren’t bright enough to be seen by the wiimote.  It works great with IR pens though, like in Johnny lee’s demos. Another problem is the viewing area of the wiimote - It’s quite hard to cover all of the display. Also, it runs on batteries and you have to keep reconnecting it which is annoying.