A insight into Wiimote hacking with BBC R&D
Post categories: blog
|15:01 UK time, Friday, 9 February 2007
The BBC has a great Research & Development department, over the years they have created some great technologies such as Nicam Stereo. Recently they have cause quite a stir with Dirac and Kamaelia, both excellent projects with a open source license. Well backstage had a chance to meet up with some of the guys at the bleeding edge, as they showed us some of the very early stuff there looking at on the side. I grabbed my camera, Stephen Jolly explained.
Using the fantastic GlovePIE software written by Carl Kenner, we used a Nintendo Wiimote to control some bits of PC software - Google Earth, using the excellent script written by J Coulston and distributed with GlovePIE, and Genome - a prototype EPG written by BBC Research to demonstrate some of the nifty features of TV-Anytime. Although Genome was written to be controlled by a traditional TV-style remote control, it was pretty easy to make some appropriate mappings with GlovePIE and get at least a first glimpse of how how Wiimote-style interaction with your TV might work. Wiimote hacking in this way is straightforward on most computers with Bluetooth support - see the Wiimote page on the WiiLi wiki for details.
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