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How to Turn your Wii into a Virtual Reality Device

Nintendo, watch and learn!

Dec 28, 2007 13:40 GMT  ·  By
Wiimote (plus jacket) is your way into the VR world
   Wiimote (plus jacket) is your way into the VR world

We've shown you cool uses of the Wiimote, courtesy of Johnny Chung Lee and it seems that the man is at it again, delivering us a neat invention, based once again on Nintendo's hot console. There's even a great tutorial video beneath, so feel free to check it out or even try it yourself, in case you want to test the Wii's potential. This time, we're dealing with a head tracking device created with the aid of a Wii remote and head mounted sensor bar.

You'll also be able to use two infra-red LEDs instead of the standard Wii sensor bar, in order to track the location of your head and get a bite out of virtual reality. As shown in the video below, the display will react perfectly to your movements (of the head and body), turning into some sort of window towards the VR universe. It's a great illusion of 3D space and depth and this experiment uses a software, which is in fact a "custom C# DirectX program as is primarily provided as sample code for developers without support of additional documentation" according to Chung Lee. He also mentions that you should have the most recent version of DirectX installed and that the software needs to know the size of the display you're using and the size of the sensor bar.

Here's a set of instructions offered by Johnny Chung Lee on his site:

SOFTWARE

To run the DesktopVR program you see in the video:

"1. Connect your wiimote to your PC via Bluetooth. I've been told it works with other Bluetooth drivers, but I have not tested them myself.

2. Download the WiiDesktopVR sample program. Read the README file on program usage and configuration. Launch the "WiiDesktopVR.exe" in the main folder.

NOTE: some people have reported a "Wiimote FishtankVR has encountered a problem" error. It looks like it may be a file not found error, but my ability to fix this is going to be vey limited as I'm leaving for the holidays as I type this... and I can't replicate the error on any of my computers. If you are a dev, and can shed some light on this, please post a comment on my project blog post. Deleting the "config.dat" file and re-running the program may help.

Developers Notes: The code is built on top of this Wiimote library. To compile the program, you will need a C# IDE and the DirectX SDK. More details in this FAQ. "