$40 Wii Remote Hack - Save Thousands!!

Ok, so this isn't late breaking, but while in my Interactive Authoring class today my instructor went off on a tangent about 3D development within Adobe Director to talking about some colleagues of hers at Carnegie Mellon University. Her friend created a cheap version of the Star Trek Holodeck(a post I will add later)...but long story short she mentioned that she found some very interesting hardware hacks Youtube. One of these hacks is taking an ordinary, $40 Nintendo Wii remote, and creating a digital whiteboard. If you are not familiar with what a digital white board is, allow me to take a moment to give a brief explanation. We are all familar with dry erase boards...they are usually white and can be found in business, schools and many homes as well. They are convienet due to their resuablity...but what happens if you have filled your entire board up and don't have enother board to keep writing on? Well the obvious answer is you have to erase it...but let's suppose you need to reference that information still or better yet, you would like to make a copy of it for future use or to print off and have a hard copy of it. Short of taking a photograph you would be forced to erase it and start over.

Well, that is where the digital white board comes in. They allow you to write just like you would with a traditional whiteboard, but you are using a computer screen as your "canvas" instead of the whiteboard itself. I have seen them as cheap as $799 but most retail for around $1499. What's more is that you are limited to the size of the board. What if you want a whiteboard that is 12' x 12'? This is where I introduce you to a guy by the name of Johnny Lee.

Johnny Lee managed to take a $40 Wii remote and create a virtually unlimited in size whiteboard. He uses an LCD projector, connected to a PC as his canvas. The only limit to the size of the canvas is how far away you can get the projector from the wall to display a larger picture. There is an amazing video which you can view below:




To find out more information on projects by Johnny Lee, visit his website at Carnegie Mellon University - http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/projects/wii/ This is also the link where you can download the software to make the whiteboard work!