S60 Open to new features

Hello,

I've been silent lately and now I can share why: I changed jobs at Nokia and joined the Mobile Web Server team. This means I won't be blogging here but instead I created (well, Phil helped a LOT) a new blog and it's called - (drums) - Mobile Web Server Blog.

I want to thank you all of my readers, fellow bloggers, mom and John Cleese in particular for the fun times so far. I hope you check out my new blog as well and stick around if you find it's worthy.

-Jukka

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.