Use Wiimote on S60 3rd Edition FP1
I read over on N-Gage Future Watch that the Nintendo Wiimote controller could be used to control N95 (N95 runs on S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 1). Since I have a Wii at home I was pretty excited about the possibility of using my Wiimote with my S60 3rd edition FP1 devices. A group of university students created a Wiimote driver for S60 called WiiConnect, that allows a Wiimote and an S60 3rd edition FP1 device to connect and communicate with the Wiimote via Bluetooth. The students also made a motorcycle racing Java game called WiiRider that communicates with the Wiimote and lets you control the racer using the Wiimote as a steering wheel. The accelerometer in the Wiimote is used to measure the movements and if you hit any cows or logs in the game the Wiimote vibrates. For those of you that are curious how this was done the sourcecode is available for both the S60 Wiimote driver and the Java game. The download and further description of the game are available from Symbian Resources.
I brought my Wiimote into work and tried it out with the N95. It worked really well! In the WiiConnect driver there is even a test mode to activate the vibrate and LEDs on the Wiimote or view X, Y, Z coordinates of the Wiimote. The only part of the Wiimote that I did not see utilized was the speaker. Audio from the game could have been played from the Wiimotes speaker making the game even more interactive. I showed several of my coworkers and most said that it was cool. A couple of guys on the software integration team were especially interested, they said maybe the Java game could be modified to take input from the accelerometer in the actual S60 device instead of the Wiimote. Accelerometers are in many S60 devices (N95, N93i, N93, etc.), mostly used for detecting if a landscape or portrait photo is being taken with the camera. This would mean that you could control the game by rotating the S60 device. I think that using an accelerometer in more games would be a great option, especially in racing or 2D shooting games to control the car or ship. I hope that more game developers look at this project and see what is possible. Maybe we’ll see more S60 games in the future using the Wiimote as a controller.
Hi Kevin,
great to hear that you like the project and even tried it out for yourself - and it’s even better that your small internal presentation was very well received!
Sound would have been great as well of course. I don’t know about the current status - but at least when the project was started, the audio format for the speaker in the WiiMote hadn’t been fully reverse-engineered / documented.
But it’s great that the WiiMote-connection worked at all in the end, as not even all PCs seem to be compatible and Symbian OS / S60 is the only mobile platform which allowed it in the experiments of the students!
Of course, it’d be great to be able to use the accelerometer in the N95 & Co. However, the API to access the sensor data is only public for the 5500 - or am I wrong about this? Would be great if I was, as the sensors could be very helpful in several scenarios…
-Andreas
symbianresources.com
Just wondering why you need FP1 specifically?
Hi Andreas,
Good question, I asked some of the software guys and here is the information paraphrased:
As you know there is a Sensor Plugin to the S60 SDK for Nokia 5500:
http://forum.nokia.com/info/sw.nokia.com/id/4284ae69-d37a-4319-bdf0-d4acdab39700/Sensor_plugin_S60_3rd_ed.html
Currently the above SDK plugin does work on:
N93i with 20.0.084 firmware.
The N93i support is not officially public, officially that was suppose to be informed by Forum Nokia but the page hasn’t been updated yet. Anyone can discover this info if they run the SDK test app. or Groove Labyrinth.
In the future other devices and updated firmwares may have support, but currently the 5500 and N93i are the only devices that support API sensor access.
Kevin,
thanks a lot for the information! Good to know that the sensor plug-in isn’t restricted to the 5500 as its name suggested… As you can imagine, it’d be great for us to have it supported for other devices as well, especially the N95!
Jukka - FP1 isn’t required, the game was developed on the N73 and is working fine there as well. We’re just using the N95 as the showcase platform due to its TV out and up-to-dateness
-Andreas
cdff
Hi guys. I was wondering if I can control anything else with the wiimote controller on my N95 (GPS, Menu, etc.). Has anyone tried it yet, or its only compatible with games?
Outliner: it’s possible indeed. Stay tuned
Kevin: when driving home today, I had some great ideas for some small and fun applications for the light sensor of the N95 (and other phones).
Do you have an estimate when the sensor framework might be released? Would it be possible to get a pre-release version of the light API before this happens (like with the release of the acceleration sensor API), or is it reserved for S60 5th Ed.?
Thanks,
Andreas
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