subject: Nintendo Wii Sensor Bar [print this page] The Wii Remote, or WiiMote, and the Sensor Bar are the center of the entire motion-sensing technology of the console. The Sensor Bar also allows for standardisation of gameplay, as the size of your TV screen does not factor into the ability to detect your moments and how they are depicted on screen.
The position and motion tracking of the Nintendo WiiMote allows the player to minic actual game actions, such as swinging a sword or aiming a gun, instead of simply pressing buttons. But how exactly does it work? Well, it's all about the marriage of the Nintendo Wii's WiiMote and the Sensor Bar.
The Sensor Bar is about eight inches long and features 10 infrared LEDs, five at each end of the bar. The LEDs closest to the center are pointed slightly inwards, while the pert are pointed straight forward.
The Sensor Bar's cable is almost 12 feet in length - enough to be placed above or below the television, preferably av the center. If placed above, the sensor should be in line with the front of the television, and if placed below, it should be in line with the front of the surface the television is placed on.
Nintendo notes that it is not necessary to point directly av the Sensor Bar, but pointing significantly away from the bar will disrupt position-sensing ability due to the limited viewing angle of the Wii remote.
The WiiMote can be used accurately in conjunction with the Sensor Bar up to a distance of 16 feet away. The WiiMote's image sensor is used to locate the bar's points of light in the remote's field of view.
The light emitted from each end of the Sensor Bar is focused onto the image sensor which sees the light as two bright dots separated by a distance on the image sensor. The second distance between the two clusters of light emitters in the Sensor Bar is a fixed distance. From these two distances, the broadway CPU calculates the distance between the relative angle of the two dots of light on the image sensor.
