Controlling movement with a Wii Balance Board

"whoisrich" wrote:
Today I added in turning to my own test program and tidied it up for release.
Runs by itself, sending WASD key presses and mouse movements to any game or application.

Please take a second to look at the included README.TXT as it explains some of the options.
Zip has both a ready to go .EXE ( + 2 DLL ) and C# source code for Visual Studio.

EDIT: Updated version available here http://www.greycube.com/site/download.php?view.68

Thank you for this work, i was looking for that few days ago.

Do you plan a thing of this kind for wiimote+motion plus + nunchuk ?

"Infinimitsu" wrote:
As promised, here are some of my thoughts on using the Wii Balance Board with the Oculus Rift, or more specifically, using this software, Wii Balance Walker.

My initial assumption was that I wasn't going to have any of the negative affects of the Rift and it wouldn't affect my sense of motion at all. I assumed that I would be able to just stand on the Wii Board with the Rift on and not lose balance whatsoever. Boy was I wrong. The Rift blew away my expectations as far as its immersive capabilities.

The very first demo I fired up was the Tuscany Demo. I set up the Wii Board in front of a stool, with a PS3 controller connected to my laptop. I pulled on the Rift for the first time and was agape in awe. Maybe I should have given myself more time with messing with the Rift, but I looked around the Tuscany Demo while seated on the stool for a minute or two and decided it was time to try to use the Wii Board. The Wii Board was about a foot in front of the stool, so I had to peek under the Rift a little and try to get situated. This brings in my first major request after using this setup:

I would really love to be able to map "Enable Wii Board/Disable Wii Board" to a controller or a key. Preferably a controller. Also, it would be great to be able to map "Set balance as center" to a key or controller button so that I can get a true center of balance without leaning over to use the mouse or asking someone else to press the mouse button.

It was extremely jarring to step on the Wii Board while half strapped into the Rift. It took me a second to realize that I needed to pay complete attention to the real world until I was fully upright on the Wii Board, the pull the Rift down over my face. Once I did get the Rift back on I was pressing my face into the wall above the fireplace in the Tuscany Demo. It felt like every slight lean of my body would hurl me in one direction or another. I quickly had to grab onto the table in front of me to keep from falling over and I delicately stepped off the Wii Board while sliding the Rift up over my face.

After a rocky start, I decided to pull the Wii Board right up against the front of my stool, so that I could operate the Wii Board while sitting in the stool, or if I felt confident enough to stand, I could sit down quickly to keep from falling over if I stated losing my balance. This setup ended up being my favorite. After tweaking some values in the Wii Balance Walker software I was able to finesse my virtual movements and was very comfortable with moving around in the virtual environment using nothing but the Wii Board for my cardinal movements. Although, this brings me to my next issue with this setup right now:

Turning while moving forward does not work well at all. I twiddled with the settings and tried switching the strafe and turn settings and I just never settled on something that worked well. Perhaps I could have eventually found a comfortable configuration for this, but I was extremely limited on time and decided that turning using the controller would do for the time being.

I never really did get comfortable enough to try standing on the Wii Board while moving around again. Maybe with two Wii Boards next to each other, one for each foot, so that you can widen your stance a little and have better balance. Maybe it just takes getting used to. I really like using it with the stool, though. I would like to see if it's possible to use with some kind of kneeling chair. In all, it was far more immersive, to me, than just using the controller for inputs. My time using it was very limited, and I think this has a lot of promise. Someone needs to incorporate this directly into their demo and fine tune it for a particular experience before more people will become interested.

It will be a few months before I have my Rift in my possession again and can experiment more. I really hope using the Wii Board gets more attention, though. I don't think enough people have tried this.

There are a few things that I think would help, but are not possible with just the standard Wii Balance Board...

First, it sounds like there should be a neutral part of the board - a place you can stand that's "home" without worrying about accidentally sending yourself flying one direction or another. This would require a larger/wider board. Another thing that I think will help is cardinal directions for the board. If I am facing my computer and step/lean forward on the board, I'll go north in game. To the left is west. To the right is east. Etc. It shouldn't change regardless of where I am facing. So movement should be independent of head direction. Also, more lean equals more speed. This a way you don't feel like you're being thrown across the room every time you begin to lean one direction. The other big thing is positional tracking, which Oculus has confirmed for the consumer version!

All four of these implemented I think would give you the feeling of being on a round hoverboard in the virtual world. It won't feel like walking or running, but it doesn't have to as long as it feels natural. It could potentially solve the first person movement in VR, though obviously wouldn't have as much use in cockpit games.

"Tbone" wrote:
Another thing that I think will help is cardinal directions for the board. If I am facing my computer and step/lean forward on the board, I'll go north in game. To the left is west. To the right is east. Etc. It shouldn't change regardless of where I am facing. So movement should be independent of head direction.

I think one advantage of using the Wii Balance Board is the fact that you don't have to move and rotate physically and entangle your wires. What you describe can be achieved better using a camera/kinect.

E.g. like in this video at 2:30
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0-dsbeasgA#t=3m30

"Tbone" wrote:
There are a few things that I think would help, but are not possible with just the standard Wii Balance Board...

First, it sounds like there should be a neutral part of the board - a place you can stand that's "home" without worrying about accidentally sending yourself flying one direction or another. This would require a larger/wider board.

You definitely hit the nail on the head that the Wii Balance Board is just too limited. Especially with this point. My idea for a new board would have a neutral position that required a certain amount of directional tilt force before it clicks out of the neutral position, giving you the tiniest bit of haptic feedback that the board is now no longer in the neutral position. Then the board gives you another click or haptic response that the board has regained its neutral position. Also, each foot pad should be able to tilt independently, so that the left foot can tilt forward or to the left while the right foot tilts back or right. This would open the control scheme up for all sorts of input commands. You could have three simultaneous motions going on at any given time, such as a full speed forward, with a full speed turn to the right, and a full speed straffe to the left. Having this ability is crucial to winning in FPS games.

While this would be the best solution, to completely design a new piece of hardware, for now it would be great if a controller button or a keyboard key could be mapped to either "Start/Stop" the Wii Balance board function, or you could hold the button to temporarily pause the Wii Balance Board input, then release to begin again, or vice versa. Or perhaps give the option of the three.

As for setting a "home" with the current board and current build of the software, it is somewhat possible, it just takes a lot of going in and out of the Rift and changing settings in the software. I haven't been around my Rift for a few months. It's about 7500 miles away from me, at the moment. I'll be home, soon, though, and I'll get a chance to play with the settings again. If I find a good setting for this, I'll post the values I used. I'm pretty sure you just have to crank the "Threshold" up and the board will not register input until you lean in that direction hard enough. Just takes a lot of messing with.

"BenKaniobi" wrote:

"Tbone" wrote:
Another thing that I think will help is cardinal directions for the board. If I am facing my computer and step/lean forward on the board, I'll go north in game. To the left is west. To the right is east. Etc. It shouldn't change regardless of where I am facing. So movement should be independent of head direction.

I think one advantage of using the Wii Balance Board is the fact that you don't have to move and rotate physically and entangle your wires. What you describe can be achieved better using a camera/kinect.

E.g. like in this video at 2:30
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0-dsbeasgA#t=3m30

Yes, I've seen that video. That's what I'm talking about, but I think it's beneficial to have a physical board to provide a bit of feedback and allow to use this standing closer to a computer as opposed to needing enough room for a camera to be able to see your entire body. That said, I'm not opposed to a camera solution either if it proves effective enough.

I guess with the Wii Balance Board, I'm looking more towards the future. I'm hoping someone will pick up the basic design and run with it, designing something new from the ground up for VR! :)

Just created an imgur album showing my idea of the ideal Wii Board input scheme. Don't know how to make it happen, but I would love to try it out and see just how intuitive or impossible it is to actually use.

Hello. I've just uploaded a Wii Balance Board demo here that some of you may be interested in trying out.

It uses a two-wheeled vehicle I built called the 'SegWii'. Leaning forward powers both wheels to turn forwards, while leaning sideways applies a braking force to the wheel over which you're leaning, causing the SegWii to turn to that side under the power of the other wheel. It also goes backwards. This feels very natural I think in VR, and the input from the WBB is good enough for quite fine control: tight and wide turns are possible at different speeds according to how you adjust your weight around the board.

Note: so far this is only properly tested on Mac. I'm using the WiiBuddy asset in Unity for the main control scheme, and reading the raw board data for all of the movement calculations. I've implemented an alternative control scheme (based on 'Input.GetAxis') so that the SegWii can be controlled in the absence of a WBB, and this allows control with the cursor keys or (I suspect) a game controller on the PC version. This should also mean that, as far as I know, the WiiBalanceWalker should allow WBB input as a joystick. I'm guessing (I've done a bit of a search and can't find an answer) that in joystick mode WiiBalanceWalker returns a continuous range from -1 to 1 for each axis, and not just the discrete values -1, 0, and 1? The analogue behaviour is pretty crucial for the fine control.

If anybody could test the PC or Linux versions I'd be very grateful.

There's also an optional positional tracking mode, which guesses where the head is based on centre of balance on the board. It's based on the crude assumption that the head will be directly above the centre of balance, so is quite a rough-and-ready tracking method, but it's interesting to get some sort of positional tracking just from the board data.

I have been playing with two forms of movement control for my unity rift project, the Wii Balance board and the MS Kinect with a zoom lense, and thought I'd add my observations.

First of all I've been testing both of these standing and I can confirm one of aabel's original suspicions:

I suspect that having the feedback from your actual balance changing might help alleviate or even prevent some motion sickness,

Myself and all four of my other testers noted a marked reduction in motion sickness using either of the above methods over using the analogue sticks on my hydra.

One interesting point that anyone with the devkit can try is walk on the spot when using a joystick. We all noticed a mild reduction in nausea, but not as much as with the controllers above (a sync with the character issue maybe ?).

Game mechanics
I have been using the lifting of the foot (tracking the ankle & knee or the weight shift on the bb) to move my fps character one step at a time (not just increasing forward speed), the stride length being measured from heel to heel on my testers and I individually.
Using a toggle button on the hydra to change movement direction forward or back.
Rotation: has been through tracking the shoulders & hip on the Kinect and one toe down one heel up on the Wii board, both of which feel quite intuitive, and much less nausea while walking one way whilst looking another on a stick.
Strafing: is done by stepping slightly (less room on the bb) in the direction you want to go, and then sliding the foot back,again quite intuitive, just have to be careful not to fall off the board :oops:
Crouching: transfer of weight to the heels and tracking hips & knees.
Lastly Jumping: not a good idea on a bit of moulded plastic, or even jumping up in real life when you can't see where or what (apologies to my cat) you may be landing on. Opted for a sudden going on tiptoes detected in the reverse way of crouching.

I am also working on a more robust, lower (harder to fall off) version of the BB made from MDF to be more stable and cater for heavier loads, will post on that in its own thread when it's done.

New member here, but I'm an avid tinkerer and I'm planning to spend lots of time with the Rift.

Anyway, Today I got SnowDrift (the free oculus rift ski simulator) working with a wii balance board by using a program called GlovePie (which takes game controller inputs and allows you to script them) to pass Wii balance board controls to another program, PPJoy, which emulates the balance board as a generic joystick (which is perfect for almost every video game ever). The GlovePie script I use for the controls is super, super simple, and can easily be expanded upon for more functionality as right now it only pulls in a single axis of movement for control. Another controller should be used at the same time for other game functions (menus, boost, etc).

anyway, here's the code:

Wiimote1.BalanceBoard.LED = true //turns the balance board LED on

PPJoy1.Analog0 = Wiimote1.BalanceBoard.JoyX

It's a pretty nauseating, but very cool experience. one of the most complete VR experiences I've tried. The line that pulls info from the balanceboard X axis (JoyX) can be swapped to JoyY and the balance board then controls SnowDrift sideways, like a snowboard. Right now I'm going through all snow sport games I can find to try and mod some kind of first person view, and then maybe some rift support. I'm having a hard time hacking Stoked: Big Air Edition to work in first person, but apparently Shaun White Snowboarding has a dedicated first person view. I'll update if I get anything working.

Updates: I've gotten Shaun White Snowboarding on the PC to work with the Rift using Tridef 3d and using the Wii Balance Board as a controller. I can't get head tracking to work (the only thing that works is if you tilt your head to the side the camera tilts, but you can't turn your head sideways or look in any directions) so if anyone has any tips let me know. IMO It's really the only thing keeping this game from being the best VR snowboarding experience out right now.

Here's some shots of the game running in Tridef taken from my top notch phone camera:
http://i.imgur.com/pc2LEtb.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/T30bE03.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/NObar5X.jpg

The game DOES have the option for native first person view, which all the screen shots were taken in. I just need to figure out a way to be able to turn my head, which really puts a dent in the potential of this game in combination with the Rift and Balance board. I'm really new in working with Tridef, so there totally could be a way to get it to work.

I'll see if I can upload a video that demo's the balance board controls while playing SnowDrift, it feels really cool. I wish there were more games out there that work with the balance board so well. Audiosurf looks really promising for balance board + rift. There's a GlovePie script that gives the balance board control called BodySurf and I believe you can play it using OculusOverlay.