Hacking Nintendo Wii to paint virtual graffiti

Any approach to the issues of virtual reality implies a general question about how to effectively plunge inside it. Despite a great variety of settings, the more feedbacks are the same as real ones, the more users feel involved on a likely situation. We can split such an assumption into the necessity of effective gestural recognition and likelihood of virtual tools to reality. In this paper we will present a system to draw virtual graffiti on the PC screen, as it were a wall. A virtual, but tangible aerosol bomb has been designed and built, by exploiting the Nintendo console gaming device and sensor system. Our object has the same shape and the same way of use as a common, real spray paint dispenser and it can be used on quite every available graphics application on a Desktop or notebook case. Besides the advantages due to the low costs and the good accuracy of gesture recognition, our system confirms the importance of similarity in simulated scenarios.