In case you didn’t notice, I released GlovePIE 0.43 a couple of days ago.

It fixed Guitar Hero World Tour Drum Kit and DJ Hero Turntable support, which wasn’t working at all because I accidentally forgot that I added 2 to part of the expansion identifier that I forgot about. It caused a Drum Kit to be wrongly identified as a DJ Hero turntable and a DJ Hero turntable to be wrongly identified as a guitar. It’s fixed now, but there may still be lots of other bugs with drums and turntables, since I don’t own either to test.

I also made it so that people can manually calibrate their Nunchuk joystick by setting Nunchuk.calibrated to false. I did that because some people complained that the Nunchuk joystick was giving them incorrect values. It will use the current value as the center point, and then keep adjusting the maximums and minimums based on the maximums and minimums you move it to. I might have forgotten to add manual calibration when the Nunchuk is plugged into a Wii Motion Plus though, so that feature might only work if the Nunchuk is plugged directly into the Wiimote.

I allowed double-clicking in the code completion list, changed the help menus to point to the new website, and moved the minimise-to-tray button down to the menu bar. That last one fixes the visual themes bug.

And it automatically runs as administrator again.

I also improved the Unicode support, fixed the “0.1 is not a valid floating point number” bug, and allowed non-latin variable names.

I fixed a bug with normal joysticks not working on the second run, if the mouse or keyboard was also used in the script. That was caused by setting something like JoysticksCreated to true when I created them but forgetting to set it to false when I destroyed them at the end of the script.

I fixed a bug with the Wild Divine Lightstone support, but I found another bug since, so it still might not work.

The “Any” object’s joystick axes weren’t working properly before, but now they are fixed.

I added some raw values to the DualShock3 object so we can try to work out how to use the DualShock3’s gyro without making it rumble, and how to make it rumble how we want.

And I fixed a bug with an extra mouse being detected in multiple mouse mode. That was caused by the switch from Ansi to Unicode, and storing an Ansi string in memory where a Unicode string was supposed to go.

And I included a couple of scripts. The cool MouseParty script for having multiple mouse pointers controlled by multiple mice, and a script to move the mouse with voice commands.

I’m sure there are still lots of bugs, so post the bugs you find in the forum. I already know about the bug with minimising to the tray and then restoring the window causing the page contents to disappear when you change tabs. But I can’t imagine what could be causing that one.

There’s just been a devastating Earthquake in the capital of Haiti, the poorest country in the western hemisphere.

I donated to CARE to support victims of the Earthquake in Haiti, by going to their website at http://www.care.org

If you live in the USA, there’s an easier way: text (sms) “HAITI” to “90999″ to donate $10 to the US Red Cross from your telephone bill.

Or text “YELE” to “501501″ to donate $5 to Yele Haiti, Wyclef Jean’s Haitian charity.

Pat Robertson says the Earthquake is caused by Haitians making a pact with the devil. Teach Pat Robertson a lesson, and donate.

Beware! Every time there is a major disaster, all the world’s evil cults and con artists descend on the poor country and try to convert and recruit vulnerable people, con them out of their money, build publicity, and generally molest people. This is absolutely disgusting and needs to be stopped. I can’t tell you which cults, but do a search for famous cults and Haiti and check what they are up to. Disasters bring out the best in MOST people, but not all.

GlovePIE 0.42 fixes some really annoying bugs: Wiimotes disconnecting when you change tabs, Wii Motion Plus going haywire the second time you run your script, Nunchuk.SwingVertical gesture not working, Nunchuk.Shake gesture missing, and Fakemouse.DirectInputY not working.

It doesn’t fix the bug with the window not appearing on startup for some people until they disable visual themes, because it works fine for me with visual themes so I can’t replicate the bug.

It also doesn’t fix an OSC bug I discovered, so OSC should be considered broken in versions 0.40+.

It fixes the trojan false positive for people who use AVG, by making Emotiv support (with edk.dll) a separate version in a separate zip file that only Emotiv users should download.

It adds support for the Neurosky Thinkgear headset (untested) and for the Wild Divine Lightstone (see previous blog post).

GlovePIE now has a right-click menu in the editor, so you can choose clipboard commands, and you can also check your code. You can highlight a section of code and only check that section for errors.

And GlovePIE 0.42 includes a few scripts, including lednerg’s wonderful Wii Motion Plus mouse script (with a few changes I made since calibration was no longer necessary in GlovePIE 0.42).

GlovePIE 0.42 now shows when gyros are calibrating by lighting the middle 2 lights on the Wiimote or Sixaxis. When the middle 2 lights are lit, keep the controller completely still.

Here’s a strange input device you don’t see everyday:

It’s the Lightstone for the game Journey To Wild Divine, sponsored by renowned con-artists and fraudsters: Deepak Chopra, and Andrew Weil.

Although portrayed as some kind of magic crystal, it’s actually a USB biofeedback device that measures your pulse, and how much electricity your skin can conduct. Your skin conducts more electricity when you are stressed (because of sweat). With those two readings your computer can know other things, like: how hard you are exercising, how stressed you are, how relaxed you are, how fit you are, and whether you are telling the truth or lying.

The game it originally came with is basically a relaxation game, where you have to go through a variety of relaxation exercises in order to progress.

I hear the game is actually quite fun and useful, if you can tolerate the anti-science bigotry and outright nonsense.

I just added partial support for the LightStone to GlovePIE 0.42, which I’ll be releasing shortly. Currently GlovePIE 0.42 can only read the Skin Conductance Level, and the “Heart Rate Variance” (it goes up to indicate each pulse). I haven’t added code to detect peaks in the HRV yet, so it can’t tell you more useful information like your pulse rate yet (unless you script it yourself).

Actually GlovePIE already supported measuring your heart-rate, if you had a Concept 2 Rowing Machine (”ergo”) connected to your computer by USB.

But the idea of a device that can measure your mental state for game playing is part of a growing trend these days, with the recent release of no less than 3 competing devices that directly measure brainwaves with an EEG: Neuosky’s ThinkGear, Emotiv’s Epoc, and OCZ’s NIA. I’ll talk about them in a coming post.

When I first bought my P5 Virtual Reality Glove, made by Essential Reality, and started playing with it, I noticed two things…

Firstly, there wasn’t any software for it, except for a handful of games that it shipped with. And only one of those games (Black & White) used it even vaguely like a Virtual Reality glove.

Secondly, when I tried to make my own games that used it like a glove, and had physics support so I could pick up blocks and throw them around, and things like that, there was a major problem… My real hand would go straight through virtual objects without any resistance, which makes it a lot harder to grab virtual objects that you can’t feel (especially when you have no depth perception, but I’ll talk about Stereoscopic 3D later). Also, it’s a lot harder to implement physics with a VR tracker than you might think, since physics libraries need to know how much force you’re applying to objects, and what direction you’re pushing them. It turns out, it’s impossible to measure how hard you’re pushing when there is nothing real for you to push against. It’s Newton’s most famous law of motion, every action has to have an equal and opposite reaction. I tried basing the amount of force on position instead, using how far through the object you put your hand. But that just sent everything flying away at ridiculous speeds, since there’s nothing stopping you putting your hand anywhere.

I solved the first problem by writing a new driver DLL which used absolute tracking instead of relative tracking. I then made a program called the Direct Input Emulator (DIE) that mapped the Glove position, rotation, and 2 finger bends to fixed Direct Input axes. The fixed mapping wasn’t very flexible, so I decided it needed to be programmable, and so after DIE 0.03 I rewrote it as the Programmable Input Emulator 0.04 (PIE). Later I realised that PIE was impossible to find with a google search, so I renamed it GlovePIE after searching for various names in Google until I found one that returned zero results.

But the second problem was always unsolvable, unless you had literally tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. Then you could buy a PHANTOM, CyberGrasp, or CyberForce. You would hold the PHANTOM pen, or strap the CyberGrasp or CyberForce to your arm, and it would stop your arm or fingers from going through objects, and give you a very precise sense of touch. You could feel virtual objects just like they were real objects. But if you have to ask how much those devices costs, then you can’t afford them.

A company called Novint changed all that a few years ago. They made a device called the Falcon, which is almost the same as the PHANTOM (since they used to work for that company), but at a gamer’s price of $200. (Actually you can get it for only $160 if you tell them I sent you, by typing the code “GlovePIE” into the referral box).

The Novint Falcon is an absolute 3D position tracking device. You hold the ball (or the new pistol grip) and move your hand and it can tell where it is in 3D space to within a 400th of an inch. That’s 0.06 of a millimeter accuracy in position tracking. It only has a range of about 4 inches (10cm) in each direction though, so we aren’t talking about huge arm movements. The idea is that it is a miniature representation of the virtual world. So you can do small precise movements and gestures and they get scaled up. There’s no rotation tracking, and the ball doesn’t rotate (yet), so it’s only 3DOF, but you won’t find more precise 3D position tracking. Which would be cool on it’s own.

But it’s primarily an output device. It lets you feel the objects in the virtual environment. You can run your hand along a virtual surface and feel all the bumps and grooves on it. You can trace your hand around the outside of an object, but can’t put your hand through a solid object. You could think of it like a solid 3D volumetric display with a resolution of 1600 x 1600 x 1600 that you blindly feel around with your fingers. But it precisely detects and responds to your touch 1000 times per second. So things don’t have to feel solid, they can squish under your touch, they can be springy, they can be slippery, they can be rough. They could even be liquids of various viscosities. There is a demo they get people to try with a ball of various materials that you can feel.

Of course, it isn’t just about feeling objects, you also get to feel getting shot, stabbed, or hacked to death. Not to the full realistic extent of course, but it’s actually extremely beneficial to be able to feel the force of a bullet coming from a certain direction so you know where to find the enemy. You can also feel gun recoils, explosions, or any other forces that games have.

The falcon can do a maximum force of a bit more than 2 pounds, which is about 1 kilogram. Which means 9.8 Newtons. Which is about as much as you would want safely.

Gamers are used to having only two senses: sight and hearing. Adding a third sense is a huge leap in user interfaces that I would love to try.

See the website: http://novint.com for info and videos. And if you do decide to buy one, please don’t forget to use the referral code “GlovePIE” to save $40 and get the full package for only $160 (and if 3 people use my code, I win a free Novint Falcon! Yay!).

Here’s the same Lego Indiana Jones script, but for the SIXAXIS this time:

// Lego Indiana Jones, SIXAXIS, by Carl Kenner
WASD = sixaxis1.LeftStick + sixaxis1.DPad
Enter = sixaxis1.Start
Esc = sixaxis1.Select
U = sixaxis1.cross
H = sixaxis1.square or sixaxis1.Stabbing
J = sixaxis1.circle or sixaxis1.SwingVertical
K = sixaxis1.triangle
Space = sixaxis1.R1
LCtrl = sixaxis1.L1

ArrowKeys = sixaxis2.LeftStick + sixaxis2.DPad
NumpadEnter = sixaxis2.Start
F2 = sixaxis2.Select
Numpad5 = sixaxis2.cross
Numpad1 = sixaxis2.square or sixaxis2.Stabbing
Numpad2 = sixaxis2.circle or sixaxis2.SwingVertical
Numpad3 = sixaxis2.triangle
NumPad0 = sixaxis2.R1
RCtrl = sixaxis2.L1


As you may have noticed, GlovePIE 0.40 and 0.41 didn’t come with any scripts included. That’s because most of the scripts out there were written for much earlier versions, and did things the more complicated and less effective way. Then other scripts copied that way, even though there were now much better ways.

I just wrote a script for Lego Indiana Jones. You can download the demo of Lego Indiana Jones here, if you don’t mind downloading 465 Megabytes. The demo is the first level, which is quite long, and when you finish the first level you get to replay it in Free Play (you can be all the different characters and thus reach new parts of the level).

Lego Indiana Jones is a bit buggy (the game, not my script) when you try to add a second player. You may have to enable it in the menu, and switch player 2 to keyboard 2.

My script is for 1 or 2 players using Wii Remotes and Nunchuks. The controls are based on Lego Star Wars for the Wii, since I haven’t played Lego Indiana Jones on the Wii:

Nunchuk or DPad move around in the game and the menu. They also control when you press against the wall.
+ Selects a menu item, or pauses the game and brings up the in-game menu.
- for player 1 is the Escape key, for player 2 it is the F2 key.
A jumps, or selects from some menus (mostly ones during gameplay)
B shoots if you are holding a gun, or can be used to punch if you are too lazy for gestures
C swaps with a nearby characters, gets in/out of vehicles, or talks to characters
Z builds lego, picks up, drops, throws, uses your special ability (whip, digging, repairing), cancels menus, or lets go
1 in Free Play transforms you into the next character
2 in Free Play transforms you into the previous character

Swing the Wii Remote vertically to use your whip, dig a hole, throw something, pick something up, or drop down from a ledge. Miming any of those actions should work.

Punch with either hand to punch. With the Wii Remote it is more like a stab, so keep your hands at the normal angle. To make it easier, you can also shake the Nunchuk in any direction to punch.

If you have the Microsoft Bluetooth Stack, when you are running the script, hold down 1+2 (for at least 30 seconds) on Wii Remotes to connect them automatically. It will stop searching once the number of wii remotes used by the script are connected.


// Lego Indiana Jones, Wiimote+Nunchuk, by Carl Kenner
WASD = nunchuk1.Joy + Wiimote1.DPad
Enter = Wiimote1.Plus
Esc = Wiimote1.Minus
U = Wiimote1.A
H = Wiimote1.B or Wiimote1.Stabbing or Nunchuk1.Stabbing
J = Nunchuk1.Z or Wiimote1.SwingVertical
K = nunchuk1.C
Space = Wiimote1.One
LCtrl = Wiimote1.Two

Numpad1 = (|Nunchuk2.RelAcc| > 10) and (not Nunchuk2.Z)


Previously I was using GooglePages to host my website. GooglePages had the advantage of being free, and because Google is supposedly Carbon Neutral, that automatically made my website Carbon Neutral. GlovePIE itself was also Carbon Neutral since I have 100% green electricity.

Unfortunately GooglePages had the disadvantage of providing hardly any bandwidth for downloading files, so nobody could download GlovePIE without using a site like RapidShare. I thank those wonderful people who mirrored files for me. It also had the disadvantage of no forum or blog. And it was going to be shut down soon by Google.

So, I decided it was about time to get myself a proper new website.

I’ve been stressing over the state of global warming and the tipping points we are rappidly approaching that could spell the end of life on Earth.

So I insisted on getting something 100% Carbon Neutral. I also needed something cheap since I don’t have a job. And I needed something that didn’t have any limits on how much users could download. And I needed a proper URL.

Surprisingly, I managed to find a number of cheap green web hosting services, and many of them provided unlimited space, unlimited downloads, and free domain names for life.

I chose this one, SuperGreenHosting.com:

because it seemed to be the cheapest and the most unlimited. I got a discount when my PayPal wasn’t working the first time, so it ended up costing me less than 10 Australian cents per day. (I probably shouldn’t have told you that, since it makes all the ads I put on the site seem greedy rather than necessary to pay for my hosting. But my girlfriend and parents were complaining that I was working for free and not making any money. So I had to abandon my previous ideological opposition to ads.)

The other service that I thought about getting for a long time was GreenGeeks.com:

They offered the same unlimited service, but they were using 300% green electricity from Wind Power instead of the normal 100%. And you can’t find better green credentials than that. It wasn’t that much more expensive than SuperGreenHosting.com, but I went with the cheapest one.

I also noticed a company called hostgator.com that went for the middle road and offers 130% green power cheaply:

Other alternatives that I found are:

Permahost.com doesn’t have a banner, but costs $10 a month.

Some other companies (like CanvasDreams.com) only offer limited plans that are a bit expensive.

Then there are two companies that take renewable electricity a step further. Rather than using offsets or carbon credits, they have a server farm that gets all its power from the solar panels on the outside of the building. I don’t think its even connected to the electricity grid. But because of that, their hosting is significantly more expensive and limited. But it’s a very impressive environmental statement and engineering feat:

Anyway, the point is… there are LOTS of carbon neutral web hosting providers out there, and they are affordable. So if you are going to make a website, like I just did, I highly recommend getting a Carbon Neutral one, rather than helping destroy the planet. It could be the first step to becoming Carbon Neutral yourself.

And that GlovePIE now has a new, and still green, website at http://glovepie.org.

My first blog post ever! I’ve finally gotten brave enough to start a blog. Sorry to those of you who’ve been wondering what I’ve been up to, or who’ve had to go to other sites to hear about cool things done with GlovePIE. But now I can keep you updated on all the crazy high-tech input devices and how they can be used in bizarre ways.

And, being me, I’ll also probably bombard you with my political thoughts, environmentalism, and whatever other random insights my brain comes up with.