G'day everyone,

Im kinda new here, and I've been looking around - I've been using the Wii Remote with Glove Pie for a while, however some of the techniques Johnny has been demonstrating has got me thinking.

I do a bit of freelance 3d graphics, and I was curious if the wee remote could be used as a sort of 3D mouse, particularly when editing a mesh it would be seriously cool (and fun) to use the wiimote as if you were sculpting the mesh by hand...eg: press one button and circle the verticies you want then press the trigger and pull away from the monitor to pull the selected vertices out or push the wiimote forward which in turn pushes the verticies backwards, or moving the wiimote on a X/Y plane to move the vertices up or down or to the left or right.

Im probably dreaming, but I reckong the wiimote has definite potential there...

Any ideas?
Cheers
-C

Rich, with all due respect to you and your very cool Edusim project, that's not a 3D interface.  You're interacting only in two dimensions.

Since a single wiimote's IR camera only tracks points in 2 dimensions, you'd need a carefully constructed setup of 2 or 3 wiimotes to track a point in 3 dimensions.  It could be exceedingly cool, and pretty difficult to get just right.  Let us know if you create such an exceedingly cool interface.

Dave MacD

Yes, the IR system is better suited to 2D applications. The accelerometers are the input of choice for 3D. The Nunchuk makes a great arcball controller for that purpose. I use DarkBASIC Professional, and the Wiimote Nunchuk makes a perfect free flight camera controller all by itself with almost no math at all.

Most 3D graphichs programs are extensible by custom plug-in. I don't know 3DSMax because I am a poor man...I use Amabilis' 3DCanvasPro for my meager modeling efforts. I am considering writing a plug-in for it, but its .NET and I despise managed code. (Because I cannot upgrade my .NET framework.)

By the way, I think I've sussed out the LSBs for the Nunchuk's accelerometer, and you get all 10-bits on all three axes, but I'd need near lab conditions to verify it, unless I can think of something else...2 bits = 3 counts, not much difference and they seem to move almost constantly.