Wii Curling

Augmented reality

The purpose of the project was to build something that explored the idea of Augmented reality for an exhibition at university. At the time things that did ”Augmented reality” did so by making users view and interact with with a digital objects via a screen, I wanted to remove this view port and project the digital objects into a space. The Wii had just come out got people talking, not quite augmented reality as you are still manipulating virtual objects using avatar in a virtual world, but it did require the user to move around in a real physical space.

The venue was an exhibition space at the university, not a living room, so I was able to hang projectors from the ceiling to create the real space that I could project virtual objects. The Wii Controller measures relative movement in real space (how you move but not where you are) so combining it with a camera that tracked the player’s location I had a decent method of user input.

The idea to create a curling game came about as a result of what was practical in the time (3 weeks). The player could move around one side of the ally to select where they throw from and the Wii Controller allowed them to throw the “Kettle” with the desired pace.

How it worked

The game was built in flash, collision detecting, scoring etc. It got information about the players location and what the Wii Controller was doing from a sketch I’d built in Max/MSP/Jitter. I had to use a display splitter to project on two projectors from a mac mini. Generally it was all a bit hacky but worked.

Here is a video of me demoing Wii Curling at Rave on air:

I was still building the demo in between tour groups, eventually I managed to get the logic working so other players could sweep. Ultimately I had to move on to other projects so Wii Curling has moved no further.

Update Jan 2012: I put this together back in 2007, the Wii had just come out and was a revolution. tracking the players location was very primitive. I’d love to have a go at it now using the Kinect. Also, since then there has been a massive growth in augmented reality games like foursquare or Chromaroma. I don’t know of many things that are larger than a living room but smaller than a whole city. I can imagine something in the future a little like bowling alleys or Lazar tag that people go to to play some augmented reality game in a dedicated space.