Wiicussion

The Wiicussion project was created by Jeremy Bennett, Adam Faeth, and Mike Oren as their final project for Computational Perception (HCI 575x) at Iowa State University. Wiicussion is an interactive percussion experience that entertains not only those wielding the Wii controllers (Wiimotes), but the audience and casual passerbys as well. It won first place, voted on by a panel of peers, for the 575 class demo competion in spring of 2007.

From the moment Wiicussion starts up, you can begin playing drums using an intuitive downward motion. You simply aim the Wiimote so that it is vertically over one of the six drums and make a downward motion to play the drum. If you want to continuously play a drum for a while and don't want to worry about locking on to it, simply hold down the B button to lock on and play that drum for as long as you'd like. It currently supports two players, each wielding two Wiimotes and an audience as large as your room.

Want a challenge? Then start up a game of Horse. Lay down a beat and your friends must match it and then add on to it. A vertical red bar indicates the timing where you need to match the note. Miss a beat, and you lose a point. If you lose all five points then you're out of the game. The last person left in the game is the winner.

Wiicussion at Iowa State's VEISHEA 2007

For those interested in running Wiicussion, the project has been released under a BSD license (giving you the right to modify and use the code however you want--even for commercial purposes--as long as you credit this project for its contributions). We are currently hosting the source code on Google Code and the project can be accessed here: http://code.google.com/p/wiicussion/.

You may also be interested in this paper we wrote for the class, describing our development process as well as some informal usability testing we conducted. Although a considerable number of changes occurred between the writing of the paper and the current product--within 2 days of writing the paper, we changed our driver over from GlovePie to the HaptCtrl library and changed the button control scheme over to an IR based control scheme. We also added some 3D images of the drum for the user to play. The IR based control scheme still needs some tweaking, but we feel from the feedback we have received that is considerably more intuitive then the button based one. In addition, the switch to HaptCtrl and IR has also improved the system for more knowledgeable players who are now able to play "rhythmics", which were impossible under the previous control scheme.

Currently this is a Windows only project, but we hope to make it OS X compatible over the summer. If you are knowledgeable about retrieving the raw input of the Wiimote under OS X then please contact me. We also hope to make additional improvements to the control scheme and the game, so if you'd like to be a guinea pig, then please contact me for that as well.

The HaptCtrl Windows Wiimote library that Jeremy Bennett developed for this project is also being open sourced (also under the BSD license) and once the Google Code project for that has been created then a link to the project will be added here. The HaptCtrl library allows for as many Wiimotes as your bluetooth driver allows you to connect and it handles the core input for the Wiimote--the 3 accelerometers as well as the IR data. It also provides output support in order to set the LEDs and the rumble of the Wiimotes. It is written entirely in C++ and can easily be integrated with your projects.