Wow, I never knew... an old fashioned sensor bar!

Hmm, this YouTube video has me wondering if Nintendo ever thought of this, of course, this is fairly dangerous to do. You have two candles in front of the television. You have the Wii with the sensor bar unplugged, and you have the Wiimote and Numchuk, and then you have an RPG of sorts. Somehow something as old fashioned as a candle can prove to be a wireless sensor bar, something that baffles me beyond recognition. I'm no scientist, but this seems like something that involves light waves. Could be wrong.

EDIT: Oopsie, linky here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1vQFchFr_Q

Neat. Nintendo does mention that bright light can cause interference, so I'm sure they know about it.

You can also build your own wireless one too, using infrared LEDs.

http://doctabu.livejournal.com/64758.html

AFAIK, the sensor bar is emitting two lights which a small "camera" in the front of the Wii-remote picks up and translates into coordinates.

Yep, the sensor bar emits UV light from 3 points at either end. The Wii controller then picks these up with a camera and triangulates its position.
This is quite excellent if you're looking to save power by using candles :b

This makes me curious as to what people may come up with by attaching UV sources to themselves. The Wii controller could perhaps be used for some simplistic motion capture stuff...

Mr. Picklesworth:
Wrong end of the light spectrum there. It emits INFRARED. :-) UV = Blue end, IR = Red end.

But yeah, if you go into the Wii config panel, you can see a grey box with two white dots in it. That is the camera view of the infrared camera, edited for television so to speak. :-) If you aim the controller up, the dots go down. Left, they go right, etc. And if you rotate the controller around the center axis, then the dots rotate, which you can see the little hand pointer on the screen mimicking. It's actually one step better than the old light guns could do.

Also interesting is there aren't just two IR led's in the bar at each end, but five, (for a total of ten LEDs) in a group like this: * *** *. I'm not sure why they are grouped like that, but perhaps it is an attempt to make it easier to pick the pattern out from background noise. Doesn't seem to work too well though if that is the case... cause it still thinks a lightbulb or a candle is the sensor bar.

neato!

It also just occured to me that in addition to the other information you can get from the positions of the sensor bar led's in the camera view, you can also deduce the distance of the Wiimote from the sensor bar by determining how close together the dots are in the camera view. You can do this because all the sensor bars are the same size. Should be fairly accurate too, as long as you're not too far from the TV.

I would think if the sensor bar LED's pulsed or flashed sequentially or with a known pattern that the system could get far greater precision with its triangulation. As long as the remotes camera was facing the sensor bar enough to get a reading, it could theoretically determine exactly where it is in 3D space.

So the Wii is so great, people are already getting bored of it and playing with lit candles instead? o.O

I'm guessing one or more of the LED's transmit the audio data for the Wiimote speaker.

Technology, eh?

No wonder the remotes chew up batteries :)

Vinyl:
The WiiMote has Bluetooth to transmit data like that, they don't need to use the LED's, and if they could transmit that much data that fast over the LED's then the cursor would be a hell of a lot more responsive to your movements cause the camera would need to have a far far higher framerate. An absurdly high framerate. Like 8,000 frames per second high, minimum. And that's for 1 bit sound.

Leiden:
Don't spread such horrible rumors. :-) I haven't changed the batteries once yet, and I've been playing tons of Zelda. Plus the console says they're still full, so it'll be at least two weeks before they die. But I'm guessing they'll last at least a month.

Man, boredom has nothing to do with it. People are just weird.

Pic of Sensor Bar IRs.

I guess as Sswift mentioned, the pattern they're done in on both sides is probably for easier recognition or something, which probably explains why there's also the sensitivity levels you can set.
(to have the remote look for that arranged pattern rather then taking in any IR source it sees?)


I thought people do that with every system.
(the first group of people usually being the ones to tear the system apart and see what it's composed of)

Just wish more titles would come out faster, my patience for Metroid Prime3 is growing thin, more-so since I just beat Zelda a day ago.

Ya lucky I'm not a Jew, or otherwise that would be the wrong thing to do with a Menorah, trust me on that one.

hahaha.. actually... being jewish myself. It wouldn't be the wrong thing at all...

Chahanahhahahahahnaka isn't a very religious holiday. It is a feastival, and anything that would incorporate the Menorah into the feastival in a way that cellebrates the light it gives is great.

It wouldn't be a bad time-device for parents either.
"Ok, bubula, you can play your new wii until the lights grow dim."

But that would only work for 8 days.

8 Days having the Menorah in front of a Nintendo Wii-based TV would be something. Try it out, and see what happens.

The kid would properly get smart and swap to a non-pointer based game at the last minute.