Create Digital Motion » Wii VJ @ antivj: Wiimote to MIDI on Windows Tutorial, Video

Wii VJ @ antivj: Wiimote to MIDI on Windows Tutorial, Video

antivj have cooked up a fantastic Wii-to-MIDI tutorial — and a very pretty feature image to go with it! (Nice!)

Much of the focus for the Wii controller has been on the music and VJ side, but they’re equally compelling as live visual controllers. Our friends at the uber-hip French visualist blog antivj have translated their slick Wii-to-MIDI tutorial into English, and added a video using Arkaos:

Wiimote to MIDI [Tutorial, antivj]

The instructions are PC-based; if you’re on the Mac, you’ll want to use wiitomidi. With Max/MSP/Jitter on Mac, try the superb aka.wiiremote external. I’d also really like to see an OpenSoundControl (OSC) application, which would be ideal for Flash and Processing. (Any ideas, anyone, on the best way to implement this? It’d be great if the core of the implementation could be cross-platform; you still need to do platform-specific stuff to talk to Bluetooth, as near as I can figure.)

What should be immediately apparent from the video, as well, is that there are many different ways of using the Wii remote in a visual patch. Here, scratching is linked to tilt; in a project I built, I used acceleration instead, with very different results. And a lot of what the results look like will depend on your visual style; I could see some great applications using interactive Processing animations, etc.

Jaymis has been working on using the Wii with Resolume on Windows; we should hear from him soon. I’ve been working with Jitter and VDMX on the Mac. And soon we should have Processing (here) and Reaktor (on cdmusic), as well.

Thanks for the great tutorial, antivj!

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Comments

bart

Here is some great info on how to use the wiimote with Resolume (using glovepie)
http://www.resolume.com/forum/viewthread.php?tid=3102

March 16, 2007 @ 5:27 pm

Peter Kirn

Wow, awesome, Bart; thanks! Between that and the tutorial above, you should be set. (While antivj used Arkaos, the tricky bit is really communicating with the remote, which would be the same.)

And, of course, it’s easy enough to customize the script/setup if you want it to work differently.

March 16, 2007 @ 5:33 pm

gavin

GlovePIE also supports OSC so getting OSC data from your Wii is not a problem, on a PC at least.

Gav

March 17, 2007 @ 3:44 am

Peter Kirn

Good point, Gavin, forgot to make that clear. We definitely need an OSC solution on Mac, though, too — and it’d be great to have an OSC spec for the Wii, as was proposed for the Wacom tablet, so you’d have consistent input.