Aussie Geek Podcast

Us geeks love the Wii and with any luck Santa will be nice to me but this is one use of the Wii, or the remote in this case; that I would never have dreamed of.

Games are in many respects push technology to the limit. Until recently CPU’s and GPU’s were driven in part by the gaming market. There was always a new game that you needed to get new hardware for to truly experience the way it was designed. So this pushes the hardware and the ideas that power the games we love and the innovation we crave. It is often hard to see how this actually pushes us forward technologically. Accept that we are happier and therefore more productive. I say that to justify the Wii that Santa knows I want. (Read: wife should have a look at the blog sometime).

Geeks the world over agreed that the Wii was indeed very cool. It was an old idea but done very differently and in a way that has been for Nintendo very successful. But the development of this technology that allows us to play fun games has caused the innovators of this world to take notice. They looked at the technology in parts and certainly not as a gaming device.

Enter the Wii remote, which is a as Johnny Lee says has a sophisticated Infrared camera inside. So he took said Wii remote and wrote some software, mixed in a homemade IR pen for about $40 bucks and created an interactive whiteboard. That is not all he did. Check out the TED talk which features what Johnny has developed using technology that we thought was only good for busting up large wide screen tellies. Inspiring stuff and you’ll never look at a Wii console in quite the same way again.

Johnny has a blog full of interesting ideas and projects related to this video. His blog has the coolest name of “Procrastineering - Giving into productive distractions“. I don’t usually do names for the sake of it but this one is worth it.

The software that Johnny wrote he makes available for free on his blog. Latest version is WiimoteWhiteboard v0.2.