1. Duck Hunt: use the Wiimote as the gun.
2. Spelling of the Dead: Spell the word by blasting zombies that are labelled with letters.
3. Use the D-pad in Pete’s Space! game
4. Fly Swat: Kill a fly that you can hear and see.
5. Read Along: Shake the wiimote on each word as you read along silently. Maybe shake it harder on the key words. Shows that the user is reading.
6. Johnny Chung Lee style head or hand tracker for cursor control or on-screen keyboard.
7. Make a character (car, pony, model, etc.) on the screen move by moving the wiimote to encourage a child doing physical therapy.
8. Round up animals in sound and/or visuals by leaning on a rocking horse or exercise ball like Rockin’ SafaWii.

Here’s a simple example using it in PyGame.

import pygame
import pygame_wiimote # ideally something like this would be part of pygame so the _ would become .
import sys

pygame.init()

# initialze the wiimotes
print 'press 1&2'
pygame_wiimote.init(1, 5) # look for 1, wait 5 seconds
n = pygame_wiimote.get_count() # how many did we get?

if n == 0:
    print 'no wiimotes found'
    sys.exit(1)

wm = pygame_wiimote.Wiimote(0) # access the wiimote object
wm.enable_accels(1) # turn on acceleration reporting

w,h = size = (512,512)
screen = pygame.display.set_mode(size)

run = True

old = [h/2] * 3
maxA = 2.0

colors = [ (255,0,0), (0,255,0), (0,0,255) ]

while run:
    for event in pygame.event.get():
        if event.type == pygame.QUIT:
            print 'quiting'
            run = False
            break
        elif event.type == pygame_wiimote.WIIMOTE_BUTTON_PRESS:
            print event.button, 'pressed'
        elif event.type == pygame_wiimote.WIIMOTE_BUTTON_RELEASE:
            print event.button, 'released'
        elif event.type == pygame_wiimote.WIIMOTE_ACCEL:
            for c in range(3):
                s = int((event.accel[c] * h / maxA + h)/2)
                s = max(0, min(h-1, s))
                pygame.draw.line(screen, colors[c], (w-3, old[c]), (w-2, s))
                old[c] = s
            screen.blit(screen, (-1, 0))
        elif event.type == pygame_wiimote.NUNCHUK_ACCEL:
            print 'n accel', event.accel

    pygame.display.flip()
    pygame.time.wait(10)

wm.disconnect()

I’m running Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon and using a IOdata Bluetooth adapter along with the cwiid driver and python wrapper. I wrote a little script (latency.py) to experiment with it. The script uses pygame to capture and record the times of keyboard events, mouse motion events, mouse button events, and wiimote button and accelerometer events. I write simple records to a text file indicating the time, type of event, and any event data.

In the first experiment I banged the wiimote into my finger so that the A button was pressed. Hitting my finger should produce a spike in acceleration along with the button hit. The data supports this with the peak in acceleration happening within 10 milliseconds of the time reported for the button hit. That says there is no significant time difference between the buttons and the accelerometers on the wiimote.

In the second experiment I banged the wiimote into a mouse button. Previous experiments had convinced me that mouse events have low latency to pygame. In this case the peak in acceleration occurs slightly before the mouse button event so the delay of the wiimote is less than the delay of the mouse.

Now to figure out what is causing the apparent delay in my other program.