GlovePIE v0.24 and sundry details about Wiimote for PC or Mac

It's not often a blog entry gets cross-posted in the Wii and PC and Gadgets sub-blogs, but this one is news for all of them. As this video uploaded by marcan42 on YouTube shows, the Wii remote's future as a PC input device just got better. Earlier we put on the Half-Life 2 on Mac with Wii remote video, and there were two other videos of it in action.

GlovePIE. Earlier, we talked about GlovePIE v0.22 from Carl Kenner. The "PIE" stands for "Programmable Input Emulator" and it lets you use the VR Glove and the Wii remote to work with a your computer. Is it as simple installing GlovePIE? Well, you'll need a Bluetooth / IR wireless link - how else is your Wii remote going to communicate with your computer?

Here's info on GlovePIE v0.24:

• Wiimote bugs fixed!
• Just extract it to a directory of your choosing. Then run it. There is nothing to install. If you want to associate .PIE files with GlovePIE, you will need to do so yourself.
• NOTE! You may not use this software on military bases, or for military purposes, or in Israel (which amounts to the same thing). Violation of the license agreement will be prosecuted. See the readme for the license agreement.
  

None of this should be too surprising. When you ask for a computer for a nuclear power plant, for example, the designers will probably make it so that you can use a keyboard as an input device and a monitor will be the output device. Well, the Wii remote is just a controller - it's used to control things. Although that would be cool - control a nuclear power plant using a Wii...

For more info about GlovePIE and for Wii remote tech notes in general, click on where it says "Full Article" below - we threw in a few technical details about the remote and there's a link to a tech-heavy place in the Internet that might help.

Download: [GlovePIE v0.24]

It's not often a blog entry gets cross-posted in the Wii and PC and Gadgets sub-blogs, but this one is news for all of them. As this video uploaded by marcan42 on YouTube shows, the Wii remote's future as a PC input device just got better. Earlier, we put on the Half-Life 2 on Mac with Wii remote video, and there were two other videos of it in action.

GlovePIE. Earlier, we talked about GlovePIE v0.22 from Carl Kenner. The "PIE" stands for "Programmable Input Emulator" and it lets you use the VR Glove and the Wii remote to work with your computer. Is it simple installing GlovePIE? Well, you'll need a Bluetooth / IR wireless link - how else is your Wii remote going to communicate with your computer?

Here's what else you need (depending on how far you want to take this).

• DirectX 8 or higher is absolutely necessary for GlovePIE to work.
• PPJoy for Windows older than 2000 or XP.
• Optional bells and whistles include MIDI Yoke to emulate MIDI input devices, Microsoft Speech Recogniser 5.1+ for controlling games using speech, SAPI 5.1+ for speech synthesis...

Here's info on GlovePIE v0.24:

• Wiimote bugs fixed!
• Just extract it to a directory of your choosing. Then run it. There is nothing to install. If you want to associate .PIE files with GlovePIE, you will need to do so yourself.
• NOTE! You may not use this software on military bases, or for military purposes, or in Israel (which amounts to the same thing). Violation of the license agreement will be prosecuted. See the readme for the license agreement.
  

Wii remote tech notes. But going back to how this is possible... Over at fashnek.com/Wiimote.htm (this link should open in a new window), we found a lot of notes on the Wii remote. Good ol' marcan also had some info there on the inner workings of the Wii remote. Here's the more basic stuff:

• The Wii remote is a Bluetooth device with a Broadcom 2042 chip - in normal English, this means it follows the Human Interface Device (HID) standard, and this means that it can work with any device that uses the HID standard. So, like a keyboard or mouse, you can use a Wii remote as an input device.
• The Wii remote works with Linux and Windows XP. According to the fashnek page, it doesn't really work with OS X because the Wiimote's HID descriptor isn't standard - but work is going on to get around this.

None of this should be too surprising. When you ask for a computer for a nuclear power plant, for example, the designers will probably make it so that you can use a keyboard as an input device and a monitor will be the output device. Well, the Wii remote is just a controller - it's used to control things. Although that would be cool - control a nuclear power plant using a Wii...

Download: [GlovePIE v0.24]