The BAC Wii project has come to an end for now – we delivered our final report yesterday. Hopefully word of what we’ve done will spread and we’ll be ask to share it with more groups. It was a really cool project to be on – the potential of the Wii and kinesthetic learning is an interesting area – and I don’t think that many people are doing much with it yet. Replacing the mouse with a Wii remote is a great way to increase engagement – I wonder if I could find a way to apply to compliance training? Would make for an interesting course assessment.

Anyway, I’m posting my outline of the Wii controller class that I spent all of January developing. It makes programming for WiiFlash super simple – just instantiate it and boom – Wii support in any Flash app. Works with all typical mouse events.

Wii Controller Engine

• Is an interface between Wii controllers (Remote and Nunchuk) WiiFlash and the application or game
• Enables quick ramp up for a developer without having to learn the intricacies of the Wii controllers or their data
  • Can add simple Wii controller to an app in as little as 3 lines of code
  • Contains about 1000 lines of code (not including virtual mouse or WiiFlash itself)
  • WiiFlash returns raw data – engine normalizes it up to make it useful for a developer
  • The Wii controllers return small, but long numbers – 0.000000007199879823173
  • “Smoothing” out the data – eliminates the hand jitter by throwing out small changes and/or averaging data over time
  • Accesses the cursor’s X and Y position – WiiFlash gives you the location of the IR points (prefers 2 of them) as the Remote sees them on a scale from 0-1 – not in relation to your screen area.  Engine handles switching from 2 IR points visible to 1 IR point and convert the data to exact X and Y coordinates of where you’re pointing
• Creates a secondary “virtual mouse” that allows the Wii mote to act as your normal mouse (separate from WiiFlash’s built-in “mouse control” mode) within the boundaries of your Flash movie
  • Uses Senocluar’s VirtualMouse class
  • A button is single click, B is double click
  • Makes it simple to add Wii capabilities to your app since it works with the mouse controls that you’re used to developing for
  • Allows for custom mouse cursors and the ability to switch between them with 1 line of code
  • Mouse cursors are contained in an external SWF
• Creates a standard way to getbutton press and release state information for the Remote and the Nunchuk.Provides “isDown” data for major buttons on the Remote and Nunchuk: A, B,C and Z
• Controls rumble – set the duration
• Provides Nunchuk data in the same way as the Remote: rotation, acceleration, etc.
• Nunchuk thumb stick – returns the position of the nub from -100 to +100
  • Also can use the 8 corners as buttons, names represent a compass: N, E, S and W
• Created (but not tested) with multiple Wii motes in mind – should easily scale to up to 4 Wii motes