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Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Project: Wii Golf Simulator

Project Name: Wii Golf Simulator (WGS)
Project Type: C# Program
Project Reason: I just got a Wii Balance Board, already had Wii Motion Plus, and with Winter starting I began playing the Wii more, plus a new diet had me trying out Wii Fit Plus. So Wii Fit Plus comes with a great Golf Driving Range, which looks at your weight shift to determine ball flight/power. Pretty good, but not great because it doesn't take into effect your arms. Slide in Tiger Woods 2K11...this is awesome because it picks up every single bit of movement with the Motion Plus and is very accurate with swing action. However, no balance board so nothing in the weight shift taken into account. The question is...how hard would it be to create something that takes both into account?

Project Plan: To create a C# program that interfaces with the Wiimote, Motion+, and the Balance Board to do data collection about a golf swing and report back information about it. Possibly even present a 3D model with movements tied to the movements being logged by the hardware.

Project Cost: $0
Project Timeline: ~1000hrs (plus or minus 2hrs) - span will be over my lifetime
Project Starting: Evening of 11/25/2010
Project Phases:
1) Datalogger for hardware
2) Data Interpreter to interpret data into body motions
3) Display Model to show motions
4) Collect data and video from real golf swings
5) Data Interpreter to interpret data into ball flights
6) Display Models to show ball flight
7) Create Gameplay/Instruction Modes

Initial Resources: http://www.brianpeek.com/blog/pages/wiimotelib.aspx
http://wiibrew.org/wiki/Wiimote/Extension_Controllers


Obviously, not exactly an overnight project (even with Mr. Peek doing 75% of my work by creating his fantastic Wii Library), but I haven't done any real programming in a long time and I was inspired. This is not my first golf-style simulator either, for my Senior Thesis project at Kettering University I used a Cognex Machine Vision Camera to track a real golf putt and determine how good of a shot it was. As it turns out, just because the ball went in the cup there are still a number of ways to determine just how good the putt was.

Eventually once I have something that somebody can see, I'll be creating a Sourceforge Project page.