Add Head Tracking to Your Favorite Game with a Wii Remote Camera

Flight simulators and other first-person view games are fun, but in order to make them just a little bit more realistic, hacker Jack Carter added the ability to adjust the onscreen view based on the player’s head position. To accomplish this, he mounted the camera from a Wii remote on top of his notebook screen, and set it up to track an IR LED mounted on top of his headset.

This works because — as outlined in a separate hack that helped inspire the head tracker — the Wii remote camera automatically tracks the brightest IR spots that it sees, and outputs their positions as X/Y coordinates. All Carter had to do was hook up an IR led to a coin cell battery like a throwie, then tape this IR light to his headset, and voila! his head position could be identified.

On the tracking side, an Arduino Uno is programmed to take input from this sensor via the I2C protocol, and configured with “TurnIntoAJoystick.bat” to have the computer recognize it as a joystick. This extra joystick was then set up in the game, and head tracking was thus enabled.

You can see it demonstrated below running on the flight simulator War Thunder.