Something "generative" to try at home with a Wii Controller

Johnny Chung Lee is a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University's Human-Computer Interaction Institute. Following up on Donald Clark's "$50 whiteboard - honestly", here is Lee's Wii projects page, from which you can find out how to use a Wii Controller (£30 from Amazon, say - you do not need a Wii games console) in various ways, including as the sensor in an interactive white-board. Excerpt:

"As of September 2007, Nintendo has sold over 13 million Wii game consoles. This significantly exceeds the number of Tablet PCs in use today according to even the most generous estimates of Tablet PC sales. This makes the Wii Remote one of the most common computer input devices in the world. It also happens to be one of the most sophisticated. It contains a 1024x768 infrared camera with built-in hardware blob tracking of up to 4 points at 100Hz. This significantly out performs any PC "webcam" available today. It also contains a +/-3g 8-bit 3-axis accelerometer also operating at 100Hz and an expansion port for even more capability. These projects are an effort to explore and demonstrate applications that the millions of Wii Remotes in world readily support."

In the continuation post is a lucid video-explanation by Johnny Lee of the white-board project. As an aside, what Lee is doing is a really good example of the "generativity" of the Internet and some of the devices that connect to it  (that is, devices being tinkered with, openly innovated with, and used generally in ways not envisaged by their suppliers, with the Internet used to spread know-how) which  Jonathan Zittrain describes, and defends, in "The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It".

Comments

[Dick Moore]

Well I spent a couple of hours this weekend seeing if I could get the whiteboard application up and running. For those that know Sheffield a trip to Bardwell Electrical (on Abbeydale Road) got me a bluetooth adapter £8.99, an IR LED 70 p, and a battery container £1.50. (I already have a Wii remote.) So two hours later I have a working interactive screen that members of my family describe as magic. Such is the power of Open Source.

I really liked the technique used in Johnny's short YouTube videos. These are great examples of using video to explain both a practical idea and give the theory in context, no flashy graphics, and a good script.