Tom Tlalim is now Dancing a Song With the Full-Body Wiimote Music Controller Suit:
Soon after the Nintendo Wii’s release, hackers immediately began uncovering ways to use its unique motion-sensing controller to interface with other things — PCs, musical instruments, you name it. But Tom Tlalim, an Israeli-born composer who now lives in the Netherlands, may have outdone them all: His full-body, eight-piece “suit” of Wiimotes interfaces fully with custom software to turn his entire body into an electronic instrument that responds to his every motion. In his suit, Tlalim doesn’t play songs. He dances them.“W_space,” as his suit has been christened, uses up to eight Wiimotes attached to the wearer’s arms and legs to form what is effectively a DIY motion-capture suit. The accelerometers on the Wii send tilt and acceleration readings to an open-source music synthesis software package called SuperCollider, for which Tlalim wrote a custom module that translates the data from W_space’s Wiimotes and allows them to manipulate and create sounds of various timbres in real time.
For Tlalim, the Wiimotes mean that he no longer needs to be hunched in front of a computer screen when he plays.
It all started with a single Wiimote, and some code to let it emulate a Theramin. (I’ve discussed the Theremin before.) Here’s where it led:
I can’t say I share his taste in music — or dance — but it’s an interesting use of technology. Of course, I’d be inclined to use a full Wiimote suit for a fighting game…