Controlling movement with a Wii Balance Board

Awesome! I found this while looking for Wii Board hack info for just this purpose. ;)

Regarding positional issue, off the top of my head it seems the easiest implementation would be as y'all say a toggle button on the Hydra. Hold button to lean, release when done to go back to movement..

Can't wait for the Unity port. When are you guesstimating your Rift will arrive?
For me I'm guessing the end of April or start of May. I ordered at 1am CST of the 2nd day of the Kickstarter & I'm around 4800. :(

I also had a quick play with using an EA Wii board for controls, ignoring bluetooth being a pain, I had to be standing on it for the pressure to be registered, I was really hoping to use it seated, but it's not that sensitive. Hmmm wondering now if I could add a sheet of metal for some initial weight.

That sounds pretty bad.

But on the surface, it doesn't really make sense. Maybe EA's board is less sensitive.

Have a look through the things you're expected to do in the Wii Fit games using a balance board - There's things including standing on it with one foot, doing pushups on one, yoga positions...

On top of that, it's known to be more accurate at reporting weight than a set of bathroom scales, and there's even a minigame built around weighing objects by comparing the difference between what you weigh holding it, and without it.

However, I will note in my own experiments that the Wii Yourself libraries don't seem to handle the balance board very well.
There's a lot of glitchy behaviour, and I've even seen the sensor data report negative weights! (At one point, Put a lot of pressure on the board, and all 4 sensors were registering about -12 kg).

I think the PC drivers might not be written properly, because amongst other things, the typical total weight reported if I stand on mine is only about half my actual weight. (not to mention that the reported weights are generally quite far from what they should be, usually being much lower.)
If that were all, I might conclude the board just isn't very accurate, but when you then add in that it frequently reports 'negative' weights, which really shouldn't happen in any normal use (even if you shift your entire weight onto a single sensor, the others should read zero, not a negative value), and I suspect part of the problem is an error in the driver.

Wii yourself is no longer under development though, and I don't know what else is around that supports the board.
(But I will say, even with all the glitches, it still picked up enough of a response with me merely resting my feet on it... So perhaps the Nintendo made board is just plain more sensitive...)

The Nintendo brand board is indeed sensitive enough to be sat on and controlled that way.

If you are getting crazy readings from WiiYourself in the demo app it might be a low battery problem. The Wiiboard tends to go ape shit when the batteries are low and WiiYourself's battery level reporting is not accurate in our experience.

Just one more thing that makes me wish we had a native PC balance board.

I've used WiiYourself a bit, and found it to be pretty glitchy. Granted, it seemed to work OK for basic Wiimote functionality. For the newer stuff, in my case the Motion+ support, it was inconsistent and not reliable. Balance board support was also added at the end, so I'm not surprised there are glitches. I guess the Wii is not the "hot" thing anymore so it seems development is no longer active.

Yes... I guess it just lost people's interest.

I know there are several things in the last version of Wii Yourself that just don't work right, and some that were known about for ages but never implemented. (The existence of the 'Full' ir tracking mode is even mentioned in the source, but there's no implementation of it.)

Plugging in a motionplus unit is very hit and miss, and using a Wii Remote plus seems even less reliable.
Attaching any extension controllers sometimes causes weird behaviour, and if you try and plug in both a motionplus unit AND an extension controller, expect something to break...

I have thought about writing a new set of Wii drivers at some point, but I just never really seem to get round to it.
(My original aim in doing that though was partially to be able to convince windows that my Wii remote, but in particular my classic controller was in fact a standard windows joystick/gamepad, and possibly an xinput controller...)

There's a Unity asset called WiiBuddy That was recently developed independently of WiiYourself however it is Unity and MacOS exclusive right now. They are working on a Windows version but I haven't heard anything on it in a while.

We'll need this when we have force feedback gloves instead of hydra controllers since we won't be able to use a thumb stick when all fingers are sensed and force feedbacked...

What does the connection look like for the wiiboard? Is it usb?!

I should clarify, when I said seated, I meant using the balance board under your feet, not sitting on the board itself.

UPDATE: I have a crappy board...

After this thread inspired me to take another look at the board and jump around on it a bit, it's now registering small foot pressure while sitting, but only on the bottom two sensors, making control difficult. Will get an official one, and if it's better I will exchange the EA board.


The Wii board, like Wii controllers uses bluetooth, you can get a cheap generic USB bluetooth adapter from Amazon.

Thanks for the info on MotionPlus support, I saw that it only had beta support, but wondering whether to pickup a black Wii remote or a PS3 move controller to play with, but seems they both have issues.

Got my rift today, and early experiments are really promising, I found navigating around in the tuscany demo scenes very frustrating, but in my little greybox prototype with wiiboard and rift it was much more liberating! There are some rough spots to be ironed out, but just as was losing steam on this wii board thing I am more convinced than ever of this being a viable input. Maybe the bluetooth compatibility hassles will be worth it.