Adventures in Wiimotion: the Wiimote differential?

Joystiq’s rather (well, outspoken) Vlad had been tooling around the Wii with his roommate and that roomie’s girlfriend, leading to a Joystiq post updated up to 14 times for each development in opinion, review, he said/she said, and political correctness in free speech. We here decided to pull out the most useful bit that this chatty trio discovered about the Wiimote.

We’ve decided to call it, inspired by Vlad’s description, the “Wiimote differential”. And since a picture is worth a thousand words, we’ll let these couple of pics from Vlad/Joystiq themselves tell much of the tale.

  

The red dot comes from a laser pointer fixed to the Wiimote, which shows where it’s pointing at. As can be seen, there’s a difference between where the Wiimote points to and where the blue cursor in The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess is displayed. CVG’s impression that the Wiimote works more like a wireless mouse than as a light gun has some proof.

It wouldn’t really pose much of a problem, especially when we’re so used to mouse-based and analog-stick pointing in PC and console FPS titles. But when it comes to using the Wiimote like a direct-aim light gun? The differential can kill.

We don’t have the exact details on how the differential works – does it change with different-sized screens, whether the Sensor Bar‘s above or below the screen, etc. We don’t know if regular “calibration” of the Wiimote “to the center of the screen” (as explained in the CVG Wiimote coverage) will correct this, or if future software updates to the Wii or to the games will allow for this differential to make direct-aim possible. Let’s put it this way: dogs don’t appreciate missed shots…

Joystiq’s rather (well, outspoken) Vlad had been tooling around the Wii with his roommate and that roomie’s girlfriend, leading to a Joystiq post updated up to 14 times for each development in opinion, review, he said/she said, and political correctness in free speech. We here decided to pull out the most useful bit that this chatty trio discovered about the Wiimote.

We’ve decided to call it, inspired by Vlad’s description, the “Wiimote differential”. And since a picture is worth a thousand words, we’ll let these couple of pics from Vlad/Joystiq themselves tell much of the tale.

  

The red dot comes from a laser pointer fixed to the Wiimote, which shows where it’s pointing at. As can be seen, there’s a difference between where the Wiimote points to and where the blue cursor in The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess is displayed. CVG’s impression that the Wiimote works more like a wireless mouse than as a light gun has some proof.

It wouldn’t really pose much of a problem, especially when we’re so used to mouse-based and analog-stick pointing in PC and console FPS titles. But when it comes to using the Wiimote like a direct-aim light gun? The differential can kill.

We don’t have the exact details on how the differential works – does it change with different-sized screens, whether the Sensor Bar‘s above or below the screen, etc. We don’t know if regular “calibration” of the Wiimote “to the center of the screen” (as explained in the CVG Wiimote coverage) will correct this, or if future software updates to the Wii or to the games will allow for this differential to make direct-aim possible. Let’s put it this way: dogs don’t appreciate missed shots…