Eli5 why does the wii remote work when you put fire in front of it?

Question

https://youtube.com/shorts/y1ONp2EfEyk

In: Technology

Answer 1

The receiver does not care how much heat it sees, up to a point. It looks for pulses in the amount of heat it is seeing. If you add background heat, the pulses will look smaller, but as long as the receiver isn’t seeing so much heat that it could not possibly see more, it will still notice that there are some pulses that occur for different amounts of time.