wiimote on head vs mounted lights

[PinkTyGRR]

Sorry if this has been solved already, but searching through the forums for wii+head+mount+ir+tracking pulled up like a million hits, i skimmed through a page and didnt find a relevant answer.

I've seen and read a lot of people using the wii remote in front of the tv/monitor and using infrared lights for head tracking. From my own not very scientific experiments of taping the ir sensor to a hat and then trying with the wiimote on the hat it seemed like the wiimote on the head was more stable and accurate.

Ultimately im wondering if anyone had experience with one being more accurate and responsive than the other for head tracking ignoring the fact that a couple ir lights are much lighter than a wiimote.

I've pre-ordered an oculus rift cause... cause its awesome!? but i cant seem to sit still and wait for it so i've decided to try my hand at building my own on a really low budget of $200, only really buying the display+board+power adapter+ski goggles, the other materials i believe i have.

for head tracking i may end up spending more for a cheap solution such as hillcrest or razer hydra, but at the moment i have a couple wii plus remotes lying around collecting dust and wanted to try those out since i'll be receiving a dlevkit oculus soon enough.

[brantlew]

For short distances and identical light mountings, they should have approximately the same performance but for larger distances you should be able to get higher accuracy using a wiimote on the head. The reasoning is this. For head mounted lights you will (most likely) be mounting them no wider than the diameter of your head, and since your head is a fixed size then as you move away from the camera the distance between the lights will decrease and occupy fewer and fewer discrete pixel locations in the CMOS sensor.

Conversely with external lights (and head camera) you can easily mount bigger and wider lights - so even at long distances you can detect finer movements and more accurate angles.

[PinkTyGRR]

Thanks a lot for the answer and explanation as to why!

[Direlight]

Motionplus is far superior. The IR method sometimes "twitches" when it looses IR point lock, even for a split second. Leap motion comes out very soon anyway.

[budda]

Hi,

Wiimotes and IR LEDS work well together - in principle.

But, it can be tricky to impliment IR dot tracking because the IR detection for the Wiimote can be skittish if proper account of the IR environment is not made.

For example, IR reflections can come back off the monitor screen or nearby objects, and there may be external sources of interference like strong sunlight.

However, Nintendo did make allowances for these possible effects by making the IR sensitivity of the Wiimote IR Camera programmable.

The best 'open-source' code for prototyping IR sensitivity programming is on the GlovePie forums.

See here:

http://glovepie.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=523#p5154

Re: Program the IR sensitivity of the Wiimote
by skape » Wed 28 Nov, 2012 12:52 am

// Wii Remote IR Sensitivity Coding Demonstration VERSION 2
// Using GlovePie 0.45 and Windows XP3 on x86 PC.

// 28 November 2012.

.... etc etc

One important feature this script has is the ability to select the high and low limits of 'dot intensity' to suppress the IR interference in your application.


Thanks.

[PinkTyGRR]

thank you guys for the great feedback! i've been trying out glovepie and will definitely be trying that out.

i think i'll try out the ir lights on the hmd but im sure i'll end up using the wiimote on the hmd instead, then im sure i'll decide that its too heavy, take it apart and try to use the innards, then i'll find its too slow or i killed it when i took it apart and just buy a hillcrest, then 2 weeks after that i'll get my rift and let my diy hdm collect dust, lol. but its going to be a fun project and ill learn a lot. appreciate all the help!