I like using the Wii Remote as a mouse and controller for games on my PC using GlovePie, but my Wii is not normally near my computer, so using it’s censor bar required moving the entire system. I decided to try to build a sensor bar that I could just use at my PC – It works okay, but not quite as good as I would like. The mouse is a little jumpy. Despite this, it seems to work just fine when I put it on top of my TV and play the wii. Pretty much normal. Any suggestions would be appreciated. Edit: I forgot to mention, i’m not really that technical, so I conferred with my brother on resisters and such. He told me to use a 3 ohm resister, but they didn’t have any, so he told me I could use two tens, and lower their resistance to 5. This project may not need resisters, but I figured the LEDs will last longer if they are not at their max.

This video demonstrates Johnny Lee’s technique for turning your display into a virtual 3D window. We hooked up a laptop to the television with an HDMI cable and used the laptop’s bluetooth connectivity to communicate with the Wii Remote. We were then able to use the Wii Sensor Bar as an Infra-red tracking mechanism to relate our position relative to the television and render the imagery accordingly. The results were quite impressive. Note that the laptop is what actually runs the VR software. The Wii Remote and Sensor Bar are simply used to relay positional information back to the laptop. We are compiling instructions for you to do this yourself at unews.me Thanks to Johnny Lee (johnnylee.net) for developing this wonderful application, and we’re looking forward to seeing this sort of technology evolve in the future!

You can use candles in place of a Sensor Bar to point with the Wii-Mote. Try it out yourself!

Quick note: Yes, this is the ORIGINAL Sensor Bar candle video. After this was posted, many others followed suit, including Joystiq.com. IGN.com even made several references to it in their articles an blogs, and someone referenced it in Wikipedia. Many have heard that the Wii’s Sensor Bar does not really sense anything at all but that the remote does all the detection sort of like a monochrome digital camera. What many do not realize is that the Sensor Bar is just two sets of IR leds that emit just enough light to be detected by the remote for triangulation. Knowing this, I decided to do an experiment. I turned out all the lights in my living room and lit two candles about three feet apart beneath my projector screen, seeing as they emit several wavelengths of light, both visible and beyond. Surprisingly it worked atleast as well as Sensor Bar when directly in front of the screen (but worse far to the left or right) because of the combination of increased IR light output and increased distance. Any two IR sources will potentially work in this manner (including two TV/DVD remotes with any buttons held). The video was recorded on a Cingular 8125 set to “cool” (bluescale) to capture enough light. I wish I could’ve used a higher-quality capture method, but the low light made it difficult. At the beginning of the video, I hold up the pack-in sensor bar to show that it is not plugged into the Wii (since it’s tough to tell in the very low light of the room). I then grab the Wii …

After a little detective work done by my bros, I explain exactly what the Wii’s “sensor” bar is and why you don’t necessarily need one.