Meant to be Seen

New version now available, with various fixes and improvements:

- Added multiple device support, you will be asked which is to be used.
You can even use two copies of the .EXE for dual balance boards.

- Actions and mouse movement updates are now separate from device updates.
This has improved performance and makes mouse turning much smoother.

Download the latest version

There needs to be more focus on simplicity with foot controllers. The onmi looks like is "works" the best but it's cumbersome for mainstream adoption. For instance I could see my parents buying a vr headset but in no way shape or form could I see them using an omni treadmill.

Im beginning question the need for foot control at all. So Maybe the solution is just better control schemes using a normal controller.

Or at most a mat or board that tracks your feet position and feeds it to a physics engine that makes the character walk.

Using feet for movement in a VR world works quite well. Using standard controllers for some genres just isn't going to work in VR, particularly games played from a first person perspective.

I seem to remember that you are not supposed to jump on a Wii Balance Board....

But if I am only 64kg (about 128 pounds) that should be okay right?

Ziggurat wrote:I seem to remember that you are not supposed to jump on a Wii Balance Board....

But if I am only 64kg (about 128 pounds) that should be okay right?

I wouldn't do it, nor would I design a game that required a person to do that. It just seems a bad idea.

I think the no jumping was more about people hurting themselves than weight breaking the board.

If your using a monitor, standing and doing small hops is fine. While wearing a VR headset,
jumps should only be done while sitting down by lifting your feet,
otherwise you could easily land off center and fall over.

WiiBalanceWalker version 0.4 is now available.

- Fixed 'Do Nothing' actually doing mouse movements, oops!
- Added option to have your balance act as a virtual Joystick.

My other experiments with feet tracking have been problematic:
- The Wii Motion Plus lacks a magnetometer, and the gyroscope alone is not accurate enough to properly track leg rotation.
- The PS3 Move controller is a nightmare to pair, so have ordered a bluetooth 4.0 adapter to see if it's any better.

EDIT UPDATE: Bluetooth 4.0 is even worse, takes 3 times longer to scan for devices to pair.

Any other news about these kinds of projects?

@ WhoIsRich: thank you for your wiiWalker util - its really great! I did do a slight modification to add proportional mouse turning to work with some of my apps I was testing better, so I really appreciated the fact you included the source code as well. It saved me a lot of time when I was testing out various Wiiboard control schemes.

Instead of a set of quasi flight rudder peddles, how about some sort of flat touch pad on the floor in front of your chair? Then all you'd have to do is mimic walking, running, strafing & turning via lifting and brushing your feet over the pad.

I was trying

WhoIsRich wrote:

WiiBalanceWalker version 0.4 is now available.

- Fixed 'Do Nothing' actually doing mouse movements, oops!
- Added option to have your balance act as a virtual Joystick.

My other experiments with feet tracking have been problematic:
- The Wii Motion Plus lacks a magnetometer, and the gyroscope alone is not accurate enough to properly track leg rotation.
- The PS3 Move controller is a nightmare to pair, so have ordered a bluetooth 4.0 adapter to see if it's any better.

EDIT UPDATE: Bluetooth 4.0 is even worse, takes 3 times longer to scan for devices to pair.

I tried this with Dear Esther. Pretty good except that I couldn't get diagonals to work. I read the readme, which said to put slight pressure on one side with heels and to lift the toes on the other foot. Forgive my ignorance, but does Wii Balance board measure placement or only pressue? Seems a good "turn" indicator would be to have one foot forward and another backward. Whereas strafe would be as it is now- leaning on one foot.

The balance board has four weight sensors - one in each corner embedded in the feet. So as you place your feet along the board, try to imagine how the weight is distributed to each sensor.

nateight have you give up with the foot pedal ,think we shall need it more than ever with the seated rift

k2k wrote:nateight have you give up with the foot pedal ,think we shall need it more than ever with the seated rift

I still check MTBS daily, and I still think simple, straightforward foot controllers can help VR in a big way. The problem with the pedal rig is it's too simple - I didn't see a lot of people backing a Kickstarter campaign that was only about some repurposed Guitar Hero pedals. Instead, I decided to push forward with my dataglove prototype and offer them as a package, but (because of the unique underlying technology) getting the dataglove integrated into a 3D engine proved more challenging than I anticipated. Recently, I've also been distracted by a separate (and rapidly ballooning) software project. WhoIsRich's Balance Board app is probably better than some pedals, anyway.

In short, if it doesn't all come together in the next few months, I'll dump all the details of the pedals and the dataglove on the Internet, but my hope is that I still have some viable, saleable products in the works here. There's still time!

@ nateight I don't know much about this sort of thing but could people not just repurpose rudder pedals ,like pushing right foot fwd = forward ,left foot fwd = back up and left and right pedal press for turning with some sort of emulator script (freepie) or xpadder ? if not and you have the time could you try to explain why thanks. total beginner with computers onlyread about freepie last night ,I definitely think pedals for turning is the way to go,looking fwd to seeing the data glove and software project also, keep up the good work.

k2k wrote:could people not just repurpose rudder pedals

Yes, certainly. Some people already have. Check out Baristan6's video of rudder-based realistic walking in Skyrim (and the FreePIE script he used). Rudder pedals definitely have some advantages over my up/down-only pedals, but rudder pedals generally have the disadvantage of being somewhat expensive. My pedals are fifteen cents worth of plastic, two cheapo potentiometers, and a $10 Arduino. There is also the problem of rudder pedals not being an "official" solution until they have full support inside the games and engines rather than via some external application like FreePIE, and this doesn't seem to be happening in any game that doesn't feature a realistic airplane. Maybe Star Citizen will help drive adoption of rudder pedals in the non-flight-sim market, but I think that's a hard sell for purely historical reasons. I'll be happy if any foot controller catches on, but I get the sense the mostly likely way for that to happen is to create a totally new, strictly "for VR" device.

@nateight thanks, your right expensive

Sorry to dredge up an old thread but I'm using the WiiBalanceWalker program as posted in here and I can't get the permanent sync function to work.......anyone got any ideas? I leave perm sync unchecked it works great but perm checked = No Wii devices found in HUD error.

Did you try the skip name check option? Normally if no device is found, either it's slow to report its name, and the ignore or a second try will work. If it's still finding no devices, it usually means it's already paired in a broken state, and you may have to manually go into your bluetooth devices and remove it.

How about the SprintR?

http://www.sprintrVR.com

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngdjDq_kPHM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnBUbnMgyV0