Paper: Human-Scale Motion Capture with an Accelerometer-Based Gaming Controller

Gaming controllers are attractive devices for research due to their onboard sensing capabilities and low cost. However, a proper quantitative analysis regard-ing their suitability for motion capture has yet to be fully reported. In this paper, a detailed analysis of the accelerometers of the Nintendo Wiimote is presented. The gravity-compensated acceleration data from the accelerometers of theWiimote were plotted, compared and correlated with computed acceleration data de-rived from a six-camera motion capture system. The results show high correlation and low mean absolute error between the gravity-compensated data from the accelerometers of the controllers and computed accel-eration from position data of the motion capture sys-tem. From the results obtained, it can be inferred that the Wiimote is well suited for motion capture applica-tions where post-processing of data is practical