Welcome to the Wiimote Hackery Studio at the Fourth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction. We will be hacking around with wiimotes on January 26 from 12pm to 6pm at the MIT Media Lab.

Through reuse, reinvention and modification of materials, people easily prototype tangible interactive systems and redesign their everyday environments. Off-the shelf devices, such as the Nintendo Wii remote, provide one entrance into this world of hackable parts and Do-it-Yourself (DIY) activity. The Wii remote and extension controllers are a family of easily available devices whose hackability is informally supported by online DIY communities. Easy to open and containing joysticks, accelerometers, gyroscopes, Bluetooth and IR cameras, they are excellent tools for the affordable and rapid prototyping of tangible interactive systems. In this studio we hope to build some basic skills to equip participants with the confidence and knowledge to use these devices in their future prototyping and design efforts.

Goals

The aim of the Wiimote Hackery Studio is to bring together a dynamic group of artists and designers and hackers (oh my!) to explore the potential of the wiimote as a material and a tool for building interactive systems.

Topics

The topics to be covered will be:

• Pairing the Wii remote and computer, displaying accelerometer and IR camera data in DarwiinRemote (on Mac) or WiinRemote (on PC) in order get a feel for sensor ranges and calibration.
• Using the Wiimote and Nunchuk buttons and accelerometers as input for simple Processing sketches.
• Using the Wiimote IR camera as an input for a simple Processing sketch.
• Connecting the Wii nunchuk to an Arduino.

We believe that mastering these basic arrangements will prepare participants to explore more elaborate prototyping capabilities on their own.

Expected Skill and Prepration

• Basic hardware skills: competence with prototyping simple circuits on a breadboard.
• Basic programming skills with Arduino and either Processing or Java.
• We will expect participants to bring a laptop computer with Arduino, Processing, and required libraries installed, their own Wiimote and Nunchuk (less expensive clones from i-con are acceptable) and to have already paired the devices. We will provide instructions to ease the preparation process. If this presents difficulties for people who want to participate, they may contact us to figure out alternatives.