Thursday, October 2, 2008

Nintendo Wiimote as a PC Mouse?

A most intriguing possibility came up recently in relation to my efforts to set up an easy-to-use Home Media Centre. As many of you have already found - if you're really cheap and are simply trying to reuse a WindowsXP machine as your home theatre, then the biggest problem is with the remote. The traditional PC will need keyboard and mouse for you to be able to be able to do things with it, but imagine the frustration of having to sit in front of your big-screen TV every time you need to select a new playlist on iTunes.

Around one of these moments of frustration, I happened to think of the ease with which my Nintendo Wii allows me to do things using the Wiimote. It'd be fantastic, I thought, if the Wiimote could be used with the PC? Well a quick Googling session revealed that quicker minds had not just thought of the same thing but had actually created libraries of software around possible solutions...

Last night using a combination of motej and the Java java.awt.Robot class, I was able to get a rudimentary mouse interaction going on my PC using the Wiimote...there are ready built solutions already out there, but I couldn't resist trying to add my own twist to things :)

This is an exciting area to explore...more on this asap!!

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