Friday, July 3, 2009

WiiCane Course Layout-Scheme No. 1



This image shows one way that a course could be constructed for the WiiCane. Here, a 30' path is marked on the floor. A user is shown walking along the path towards the light bar at the goal end. The light bar is an 8' long horizontal beam that is supported on two adjustable stancions. In this rendering, the light bar is about 40" above the floor. A visual spectrum camera is mounted to the mid point of the light bar. This camera faces the user, and is intended to track a color dot that is pinned on the person's torso. The camera will track the person's absolute x-axis position (left or right of the travel path). Then, lights mounted on the face of the light bar provide information on arc width, arc-centeredness, and arc height at mid-swing. In this version, there are no lights on the floor. In this image, the floor has visual markings to help an observer determine the user's position in terms of distance from the starting point and amount of veering. A 24 inch wide starting block allows the user to square off at the beginning of the route.

1 comment:

zeveland said...

A short followup here since some people have been confused about the need for both the lightbar/cane-mounted Wii Remote AND video camera/colored dot combinations...

While the lightbar/WiiMote combination gives us a very precise measure of arc width, arc amplitude, and the position of the cane in general, it tells us nothing about the location of the traveler.

The video camera/colored dot combination gives us fairly precise information about the traveler's position but doesn't have sufficient resolution to determine the cane's position.

By combining them, we can determine cane position with the first method and traveler position with the second, then combine these two measures to get an accurate picture of where both the traveler and cane are at any given time.