WiiNintendo

Johnny Lee, a Computer Engineer who has chosen the Wii Remote as one of his main hacking platforms.

Hacked Gadgets had a chat with Johnny today:

HG: I get the feeling that you are a very busy person. Selling your cool steadycam units, doing audio recording, photography and completing a Ph.D. sounds like enough to keep three people up to their necks in work! How do you manage to stay on top of it all?

JL: Haha,I’m not sure. If you ask my friends, they might actually say that I don’t seem to be that busy. I guess I just spend a lot of time on my hobbies that I really enjoy doing and it turns out that my hobbies end up being productive. Even the Wii remote work started as a way to procrastinate working on my on my thesis. Sometimes projects can grow it’s own legs, like the steadycam. Enough people started buying them that I can now pay people to help me manufacture and sell them. That way I can move on to do other things.

HG: Your Wii projects have been taking the Web by storm! What attracted you to the Wiimote as your interaction device of choice?

JL: Well, I was excited by the Wii Remote ever since the original press release about it’s capabilities was public. Ironically, I was an intern at Microsoft the summer before the Xbox 360 was launched. Several internal people, including me, were still trying to convince the Xbox group they should put an accelerometer into the controller. That, of course, didn’t happen. The Wii remote is one of the most sophisticated input devices available today and an amazing piece of engineering containing an accelerometer, camera, and wireless communication. Combined with the ease in which you can connect it to a computer made it an obvious choice for experimentation.

HG: Have you had any discussions with Nintendo? Do you think they could use some of your techniques to enhance their console?

JL: I have not formally had any contact with Nintendo about this. I speculate that the Nintendo engineers who developed the controller probably knew of this technique, but probably passed on the idea or were saving it for a later product launch. But, these ideas can definitely be used in a Wii title assuming they would be willing to bundle a little bit of new hardware with it. I know several game developers are starting to look at the idea. Hopefully, the game concepts will make it all the way to market.

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