Controlling movement with a Wii Balance Board

Wow, that's brilliant!
When I was considering the wii as a foot conttoller, I couldn't think of a way to allow turning on yourself, but you solved the problem with an intuitive solution that I didn't think could work but indeed is very effective.
I also love how you can easily control different speeds for all the allowed movements!
Nice work!
Do you think it can be used while sitting too, maybe adjusting some software parameters? In that case it can be a killer device!

Thanks! it's also fun to use, which is a huge plus, it's got a small learning curve, but much smaller than the shock of using 2 analog sticks in a FPS like when Halo 1 hit the market. We've had success in teaching a 3 year old how to use it, and a 50+ year old how to use it , and of course several ages in between.

While we did not develop this solution with sitting in mind, it does indeed work well while sitting, my wife says it is even easier to dial in precise movements while, but I think that's just because she is clumsy :lol: However when you are sitting down you don't get the inner ear feedback, however slight it is, when using the board while standing. I suspect that having the feedback from your actual balance changing might help alleviate or even prevent some motion sickness, won't know for sure though till I get my devkit.

hehe.

I was wondering if that'd work.

I come up with a lot of ideas like this, but usually don't get around to testing them.
It's always fun to see someone else proving that it works though. XD

Wow, I was just thinking Yesterday that it'd be awesome to create some kind of snowboarding-type game with the Rift and a Wii Balance Board. I even went so far as to see if it was easy to get hooked up with Unity, but it didn't seem anyone had already done the work there.

I was also thinking about this. Looks great! How hard is it to work with the Wii Balance board in Windows?

Maybe someone needs to Kickstart a PC version.

I am glad so many others had the same idea! Just confirms it's a good idea! We implemented it using the WiiYourself library I encourage you guys to try it as well! We will probably release some playable demos of this working after we get our Rift so others can give us feedback about how it feels to control.

One of our goals is to create intuitive interfaces that allow gamers to do the things they are used to, but in new more immersive ways, and do it as cheaply and accessibly as possible. I also have some slight hope that a standing input that uses your center of balance as a controller will help alleviate some of the motion sickness people experience in VR.

Wii fit boards are piling up at Gamestops, so go out and get one! Just make sure to wipe it down with bleach before using it :lol:

"rmcclelland" wrote:
I was also thinking about this. Looks great! How hard is it to work with the Wii Balance board in Windows?

Maybe someone needs to Kickstart a PC version.

It's not incredibly hard, though there's definitely room for improvement with driver support.

Any PC with bluetooth can pair with Wii remotes. (as far as the hardware goes, a balance board behaves as though it were a wii remote with a permanent attachment), although various bluetooth drivers can be a little buggy at times.

The existing drivers are reasonable to work with if you're creating entirely custom code, and link directly to the drivers (which you should be doing really, because motion controllers aren't that useful otherwise.)

Setting one up to behave as though it was a standard windows controller of some kind is more difficult though.

I'm still looking at writing an entirely new set of windows drivers for Wii hardware, but primarily for the purposes of emulating keyboard/mouse/joystick/gamepad functions for general use.

The existing libraries aren't too bad if you build software directly around them, and as long as you aren't trying to work with some of the as of yet unimplemented features. (For instance, the Wii IR sensors can operate in a mode that provides a lot more information about the points it tracks, but to date I haven't found a driver that implements this.)

And yeah... Balance boards are pretty cheap. I got one for I think... about £9 second hand. The shop I got it from had about 30-40 of them... XD

This is really impressive! My only gripe, is that with positional tracking, which in my mind is a must, looking around a corner would cause you to side strafe as well. Have you thought about that at all? This also seems to be an issue when boarding and un-boarding. Maybe have it set up where you can toggle movement on and off. And have it so that it toggles off automatically if you step off the balance board. Please keep us updated ;) .

"konchok" wrote:
This is really impressive! My only gripe, is that with positional tracking, which in my mind is a must, looking around a corner would cause you to side strafe as well. Have you thought about that at all? This also seems to be an issue when boarding and un-boarding. Maybe have it set up where you can toggle movement on and off. And have it so that it toggles off automatically if you step off the balance board. Please keep us updated ;) .

I suspect if you check the head tracking data (which you'd need to be able to lean around a corner for instance), you could alter the behaviour by checking the data against eachother.

If you're on the board, then any translational movement of your head can only be done leaning; your feet are almost stuck to one place.

Thus, you can assume that if your head position is far away from the board position (which you can work out with a calibration step if nothing else), then you ignore movement.

But... That's something that you'd need to work on once you have both systems set up

"konchok" wrote:
This is really impressive! My only gripe, is that with positional tracking, which in my mind is a must, looking around a corner would cause you to side strafe as well. Have you thought about that at all? This also seems to be an issue when boarding and un-boarding. Maybe have it set up where you can toggle movement on and off. And have it so that it toggles off automatically if you step off the balance board. Please keep us updated ;) .

Yeah this is one of the things we are worried about as well, and have not spent any significant time looking into yet because we do not have a rift or a positional tracking solution yet. However one thing to keep in mind with what we are doing is we are not measuring pressure on the board alone, but the center of balance, and the orientation of the hips, so it may be possible to allow for leaning and looking around corners without the inteface also moving the player. But we don't know how much lean we need to allow for until we know for sure what the positional tracking solution will be.

One thing we have seriously considered is using a button to enable/disable moving, it's not ideal in my mind for a few reasons, but it is acceptable. It would solve both the leaning and getting on/off the board.