Overview

WiiSenter was the application that I created as part of my dissertation for my undergraduate degree. It is a relatively simple Windows application that allows you to control a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation using a Nintendo Wii remote connected to your PC through BlueTooth. It makes use of the motion detectors built into the Wii remote to allow the user to draw shapes and perform movements using the remote to perform tasks such as navigating between slides and zoom in or out of the presentation. When the application is active, it also observes the remote’s movement and allows it to be used as a remote pointer. It is also highly customisable, and allows the user to create their own gestures and refine the movement recognition to better suit their movements.

Technical Details

WiiSenter is a Windows Forms 2.0 program written in C# using Microsoft Visual Studio 2008. It leverages the Microsoft Office Interoperability libraries to allow the application to parse and show PowerPoint presentations without coding it by hand (which would have been a dissertation project by itself). The gesture recognition is performed using a combination of Euclidean vector quantization and a probability model known as a Hidden Markov Model (Wikipedia Article).

Communication with the Wii remote is done by reading and writing data from and to the device using the BlueTooth HID stack. Parsing of the incoming data is done manually using the information provided by the WiiBrew project.

The project breaks into three main sub-systems. The implementation of a Wii Remote object for using the device, an object-oriented Hidden Markov Model object (and associated matrix objects and algorithms) for parsing the incoming pattern recognition data, and another for the user interface and presentation display.