‘Wii hacker’ part of Microsoft’s Natal effort

Johnny Chung Lee, the former Carnegie Mellon researcher known for finding creative ways to adapt the Wiimote, has revealed himself as one of the minions behind Project Natal, Microsoft’s effort to add motion-sensing capabilities into the Xbox 360.

Lee, who is now a researcher at Microsoft, said in a blog posting that he has been working on the motion-sensing project.

“Now, I should preface by saying I don’t deserve credit for anything that you saw at E3,” Lee said in the blog, which he posted on Monday night. “A large team of very smart, very hard-working people were involved in building the demos you saw on stage. The part I am working on has much more to do with making sure this can transition from the E3 stage to your living room – for which there is an even larger team of very smart, very hard-working people involved.”

For his part, Lee said he thinks Microsoft doesn’t get the credit it deserves in the consumer arena.

“It’s sort of a bummer that Microsoft gets kinds of a bad rap,” Lee said. “It’s a lot of very ambitious groups trying to do big things. Not everything makes it out the door.”

Lee, who works in an applied science group that sits between the research and product arms at Microsoft, says that the company is working on some very cool stuff, though he could not go into a lot of details.

“I played a little bit with the depth cameras before Microsoft,” he said. “The technology I have been able to play with since coming to Microsoft is a lot better.”

[cNet]

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