WiiRemote Programming: development experiences of interactivetechniques that can be applied to education for young engineers
Akihiko SHIRAI ∗and Simon Richir
Arts et Metiers ParisTech
Presence and Innovation Lab

Takuya IWAMOTO†
Kanazawa Institute of Technology

Takayuki KOSAKA‡
Kanazawa Technical College

Hidetaka KIMURA§
jig.jp co., ltd.

1

Education issues of computer interaction
techniques at technical college

Programming education is very important in engineering education;
however it is a challenge to find attractive issues for students thatcan motivate them. Students especially, need complex skills to develop new interactive projects that use noble devices. Kosaka, alecturer of programming in the “Global Information Technology
department at Kanazawa Technical College” which provides educations for game programming, application development project sand international language skills. Students’ skills are not high at thebeginning. Nevertheless, they are not interested in a text-based programming assignment such as “Hello Worlds.” They are, howeverinterested in the development of video games and software, but they
are unmotivated to learn the fundamentals of basic C language andcoding. To motivate students to learn codes they need more stimulating methods; standardof text-base teaching is no longer effective. To motivate students, Kosaka introduced them the WiiRemote,a game controller of Nintendo Wii, to learn C# with WiimoteLib.
Students immediately took an interest and initiated dialog with theteacher, asking “How can I obtain the value of acceleration sensors?”

2

IVRC: Student contest around the world
drinking straw(Wiimote)

IR-LED

projector

foods
air actuator
blower fantank
bluetoothbackair valve

air flow sensor
odor sensor(OMX-SR)

H8-Microcomputer
air compressor3A textbook “WiiRemote Programming”

Akihiko Shirai studied the development of WiiRemote in PC environment for research of new interactive techniques. His experiments were archived as a book, WiiRemote programming withKosaka, Kimura (a graduated software engineer from IVRC), andsome Flash contents creators. The book was designed as a textbook to explain about mathematics, physics and programming essentials through WiiRemote developments in several language environments such as scripting of GlovePIE, processing, ActionScript,
C++, C#.NET and XNA with fundamental hands-on examples. Thebook was aimed at high school or technical college students who
have an interest in programming in Kosaka’s method. The bookalso described some latest application developments for higher educated readers to explore new interactive techniques using WiiRemote with the latest methods of human-centered interaction design.
It tells that there is a continuing path of interactive techniques tolearn programming with attractive motivations by innovative gamecontroller for young engineering students.

4

Workshop developments

screenIR-Camera

hosein New Orleans, U.S.A. and Digital Contents Expo ConTEX 2009in Tokyo, Japan. Finally, their education had been perfected withworld-wide presentations by a WiiRemote project.

computersolenoid valve

Figure 1: System of “La Flèche d’odeur” by Iwamoto et al..
Iwamoto (Kosaka’s student) and his team participated in an international competition “International Collegiate Virtual Reality Contest(IVRC)” with a project, “La Fl‘eche d’odeur” a shooting game system which configured a smell sensor and WiiRemote (Fig.1). IVRC
was established in 1993. It is a contest of interaction and virtual reality by fusing art and technology. Their team won at the 3rd place
at IVRC 2008. The project also placed at Laval Virtual ReVolution
2009 in Laval France, SIGGRAPH 2009 Emerging Technologies∗ e-mail:shirai@mail.com† e-mail:takuya-I@kosaka-lab.com‡ e-mail:kosaka@neptune.kanazawa-it.ac.jp§ e-mail:hide.kimura@gmail.com

Copyright is held by the author / owner(s).
SIGGRAPH Asia 2009, Yokohama, Japan, December 16–19, 2009.
ISBN 978-1-60558-858-2/09/0012

We had a few opportunities to teach our experiments of WiiRemotetechniques to students at a university. These experiences had been
redeveloped for the public as a workshop which gives opportunities
to develop new interactive toys and games using consumer electronic devices. It was very effective for young students to learn
about the importance of mathematics and physics include trigonometrical function and gravity to understand physical condition ofWiiRemote by realtime sensor data. Some participants were retired
video game developers who would like to find new challenges inentertainment system development. They also made connections
with other participants. Unfortunately, the cost for preparing materials like PC, Bluetooth adapter ($20) and WiiRemote ($40) isexpensive. But the noteworthy difference with other materials likeelectronic circuits is its stability of WiiRemote as a concrete consumer device.

5Conclusion

This article reported a case study, challenges for IVRC, textbookand workshops for learning interactive techniques using WiiRemote, a very stable consumer video game controller. As a background in Japan, “measurement and controlling by programming”
is introduced into a new compulsory education in middle schools
in Japan. Programming education is very important in engineering.
We hope our experiences will contribute to improvement and advancement of new interactive techniques especially to constructing
educations with attractive methods for young students.