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Motion sensors arenвЂ™t really new in teaching labs, so why did this one get me so wound up IвЂ™d spend a whole vacation teaching myself new stuff just so I could play with it? One thing is that itвЂ™s three axes and not just one.

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There is software using the Wiimote to teach drumming technique (p20).

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For ergonomics, particularly in sports, it would be nice to have a small data recorder light enough and rugged enough to be carried with the athlete so that the Bluetooth range wouldnвЂ™t be an issue. Then students could see, in real time, the accelerations of two carts as they collided with each other. One, which has some implementation but, as far as IвЂ™m aware, for Macs, is tracking two Wiimotes with the same computer. There are a few things IвЂ™d like to develop that donвЂ™t exist yet. (The catch here is staying within Bluetooth range, roughly 10m, of your laptop.) Imagine athletes strapping a Wiimote to an arm or leg or head to monitor how they move вЂ“ the next step from video analysis. Try to match a particular pattern of acceleration and deceleration. Walk around and see how you accelerate and decelerate with each step. Why do two or three of the traces show periodic accelerations and not just one? Strap the Wiimote to the catcher in a ballistic pendulum experiment and see how long it takes the collision to occur. So what can you do with this? Swing it in a circle around your head and see how high the acceleration will go (the Wiimote canвЂ™t measure more than 5 g unfortunately). (The so called вЂњvomit cometвЂќ also reproduces free-fall and some roller coasters at least come close by having parabolic arcs in their tracks.) This means that if you drop the Wiimote, all three axes will report no acceleration while if you set the Wiimote on a flat surface, at least one axis, depending on orientation, will report an acceleration of magnitude g. Since the mass is suspended within the body of the Wiimote, dropping the Wiimote reproduces the condition of astronauts in orbit вЂ“ free-fall. What the Wiimote reads is how much the springs are stretched. The Wiimote tracks acceleration through a tiny mass suspended on even tinier springs in three directions. (The camera is reported (see Sensing) to be made by PixArt and works by triangulation.) I havenвЂ™t set up my light sources yet, so IвЂ™ll have to write about that some other time. The Wiimote tracks position by tracking the locations of up to four infrared light sources with a camera in one end of the Wiimote. I havenвЂ™t finished yet, but will get back to it eventually вЂ“ maybe spring break. In fact, I spent most of fall break in the middle of my parentsвЂ™ living room floor with family and in-laws carefully avoiding me while I muttered imprecations and obscure incantations as I tried to learn Xcode and Eclipse (free software to make programming easier), Objective C and OpenGL (programming languages), and Subversion (a way of letting a bunch of people work on the same program without driving all and sundry completely crazy) just so I could make DarwiinRemote a better platform for teaching physics.

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Being a Mac user, DarwiinRemote is the only software I have any first-hand experience with for the Wiimote. If you have a Wiimote handy, or can extract one briefly from a nearby teenagerвЂ™s hands, take a look at DarwiinRemote (on Macs) or WiinRemote (on PCs) to get an idea of how the Wiimote might be useful for teaching physics. Wiimote tracking acceleration (green spikes) of a cart on an air-trackДЄs the cart rebounds off a stretched rubber band. As far as classrooms are concerned, I think the smart board application is going to have the most impact: itвЂ™s easy to use and, to be terribly mundane, the price is definitely right. To get an idea of what kinds of things, take a look at Johnny Chung LeeвЂ™s videos: tablet computer / smart board, virtual reality, finger tracking. What this means is that the Wiimote can be used for a lot more than playing video games.

Better still, it communicates with the world using the Bluetooth protocol which most recent computers also use. The Wiimote measures acceleration and position in three dimensions. The gadget IвЂ™m referring to is the remote for the Wii gaming platform, sometimes called the Wiimote. Why do I think this is going to be so important? ItвЂ™s cool, itвЂ™s powerful and flexible, itвЂ™s cheap, and a fair number of our students already have or want one. In late October or early November of last year, eons in academic life, one of our graduate students introduced me to something that I think is going to have a dramatic impact on teaching physics and on how we interact with computers, especially in the classroom. Lenore Horner of SIUE (a physics professor who works down the hall from me and who has the best toys in the department.) The following is a guest blog post written by Dr.

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