18 March 2008
mobiPad by Alexander Erifiu & Mario Grammer
Control your phone with Nintendo Wii™ remote
 Well, I guess that most of you, especially Nokia N73 owners will agree with me that Controlling a game on a mobile phone is often a bigger challenge than the game itself, all these tiny buttons that are positioned close together, playing a game can be cumbersome and inaccurate.
The most common solution is adapting and optimizing the games to the keyboard of mobile phones, which naturally limits the possibilities and affects the game play but now there is a new and better approach that promises very intuitive and natural way of controlling the games.
Sure, I am talking about the external controller, but not the ordinary one, students Alexander Erifiu and Mario Grammer at the University of Applied Sciences in Hagenberg (Austria) at the department of Mobile Computing have managed to create the mobiPad application that allows controlling your entire phone with the Nintendo Wii™ Remote.
This includes all games that you might have installed, as well as the rest of the phone like the media player. Essentially, the Wiimote is turned into a high quality wireless controller for your phone.
Tests have shown that it’s not the best way to simulate digital keys (pressed or not pressed) using analogous motions of the WiiMote. As a consequence, you will usually control the games using a traditional d-pad. In contrast to the predecessor WiiConnect / WiiRider (which allowed controlling a motorcycle game by using the Wiimote as a virtual handle of a motorbike – free download at symbianresources.com, the new mobiPad dropped support of motion control in favour of utilizing all keys as well as the d-Pad of the Wii Remote for optimal control of every game.
Another very interesting aspect is the recent ascent of touch screen dominated phones. A touch screen makes it impossible to play mobile games that have not been specifically designed for it. This situation is true for most of the currently available Java ME games, and already applies to most of the SonyEricsson UIQ-based phones – the keypad does not feature a joystick and the buttons are difficult for gaming due to their two-letter-input method. While this is a great feature, it just isn’t optimal for mobile games. Through mobiPad, you can play any standard game on those phones as well, no matter if they have QWERTY-keys or no keyboard at all!
Summary & Download
Getting back to the start of the posting, you can see how this solution solves the issues with dedicated mobile game controllers described above:
- You don’t need an SDK for using the Wii Remote to play games. Just start mobiPad and connect it to the WiiMote. The application will be active in the background and transform the wireless control input into simulated key input.
- The Wii Remote is of course no specific mobile game controller. Use it at home for your console, put it into your rucksack when you’re planning to travel and want to have a better gamepad with you.
- Due to the enormous experience of Nintendo producing game controllers and the huge volumes, the build quality of the controller is great and the price tag is good considering this.
Alexander and Mario have released mobiPad as Freeware (donations are welcome), you can download it from their dedicated web site http://www.mobi-pad.com/. If you're searching for a new game to play using the Wii Remote, try Grizzle Dizzle, which was created by the same developers!
mobiPad is available for S60 3rd Edition and UIQ 3.x. The current version (1.0) is Symbian Signed and has been tested very thoroughly, but due to the nature as a non-commercial research project, it might not be 100% bug-free. Please inform the developers of any issues you might encounter. Future versions might also include the possibility to define a custom key mapping. This mostly depends on your feedback!
Get it from developer or right here:
mobiPad for S60 3rd Edition
mobiPad for UIQ3
Developing software costs money and takes lots of time. We have chosen to distribute all our projects as freeware, but it
would be great if we could cover some of our expenses (and the hundreds of hours
spent).
If you like this software and would like further versions with cool new features, please donate - Thank you!
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