

Genius hack by PhD candidate (with source code): Turn any monitor into a 3D display using a Wiimote - thorax
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=976

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iamelgringo
Not only is he working on some really cool stuff; I think that one of the most
powerful things about Jonny Lee, is that he's such a great communicator. I'm
sure the guy has a pretty big brain between his ears if he's getting his PhD
in CS at CMU. But, he really does have a gift for being able to break down a
subject and be able to communicate it well. He also understands the video
medium and uses it to his advantage.

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mynameishere
Yeah, and did you see him bustin' moves toward the end? Awesome.

How exactly do people interface into hardware like the Wii remote? What he's
doing doesn't actually seem computationally difficult--the hard part seems to
be...you know, getting the xyz coords from the device.

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ks
There are drivers for it, but I don't know how good they are.

<http://www.wiili.org/Wiimote_driver>

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ArcticCelt
I sincerely feel like standing up and giving a long standing ovation. This is
the future of gaming, at lest for 3D shooters, nothing less.

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greendestiny
I'm really not sure about that, and for the sake of all the other VR and AR
researchers who have gone before Johnny Lee - he really didn't invent
rendering based on head tracking. The reason I'm not sure about this tech for
3D shooters is that its like looking through a virtual window, you can't fully
reorient yourself in 3D - I'm not sure what combining this and full mouse-look
control would be like. Also on a PC based setup where you're close to the
screen the lack of stereoscopic vision would be more obvious.

I think its more likely the future of different sort of game - maybe those old
cabal style scrolling shooters for instance.

Here's a video of some guys doing the same thing with face tracking (ie no
LEDs needed) - <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUdZk4KUDTI>

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danteembermage
My idea... an old west shoot out. You're in the saloon, peering out the window
with a rifle. You can duck out of sight behind the television just like you
could with a real window. You could also limit your exposure to different
baddies by changing you angle of attack.

The directional pad or keyboard could switch between windows, doors, newly
created holes, etc.

It's not immediately obvious how this will revolutionize all shooters, but for
the shooting gallery type this should be included in all of them starting now.

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ivankirigin
At iRobot I had the luxury of having lots of people trying to sell us 3D
headsets and such. It would make a huge difference for controlling a robot
remotely.

It's clear that this tech provides much better impression of 3D than any
others I've seen.

It would work for a small display as well, letting you look around through a
tiny portal.

Also, am I the only one who things "cake" when someone says "portal"?

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LogicHoleFlaw
No..... and I'm surely not the only one who thinks "lie" when someone says
"cake".

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allenbrunson
from his blog, at <http://procrastineering.blogspot.com/> \--

"Louis Castle announced yesterday at GDC2008 that EA's upcoming title 'Boom
Blox' will ship with an easter egg that allows head-tracking using the Wii
remote! [...] I'm proud. If this pans out, it'll be only 5 months between the
initial research prototype to integration into a major product release. Sweet!
Happy to see my stuff being used. [...] Just in case you are wondering: No, I
don't get any royalties or benefits for the use of this technique in games.
Personally, I'm much happier impacting the state of technology on such a large
scale in such a short period of time rather than struggling to transform it
into personal financial gain."

sigh. if we were just a LITTLE bit greedier, he could be so, so rich.

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pfedor
Not directly related to the article, but let me mention a patch for Quake II
my brother wrote a while ago, which creates another kind of 3D illusion using
red-blue glasses: <http://www.jfedor.org/red-blue-quake2/>

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tyohn
I wish I had a Wii developers kit. It would be so cool to create games using
this technique.

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dkokelley
I used his whiteboard project to turn my laptop into a touch-capable laptop.
The only thing is that my IR source doesn't work very well. I replaced a
keychain LED with an IR LED but the switch is a simple squeeze and it is
incredibly hard to turn it on and get a good signal, so when I'm trying to
calibrate it, I usually accidentally click twice and have to redo it. Does
anyone have a good idea for an IR pen?

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redorb
Good presentation! Johnny Lee has been evolutionary in wii hacks, a genuine
hacker

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gojomo
What's awesome about this is how some low-tech (but only now common with the
Wii) pieces have been assembled to give a more immersive/convincing 3D
viewpoint than ever before.

It's still not stereoscopic vision, but I believe there's an obvious and still
fairly cheap extension that could reach that next level: place a pixel-aligned
vertical lenticular lens¹ on the monitor.

This can make it so that at predictable distances from the screen, each eye
sees just even or odd columns of the display, which would each show just the
left-eye or right-eye frames. Without eye-tracking, being just a little off
optimal position could ruin the effect.

With cheap eye-tracking, software can see which eye is in which zone, always
maintaining the proper left-right mapping. (There might be flickering in
transitions; I suspect people would adapt or software could fall back to
monoscopic when eyes are misaligned. Thus you always have at least as strong
an illusion of 3D as in this demo, but if your eyes fall into the proper lens
bands -- boom! -- true stereo vision.)

¹ <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenticular_lens>

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pius
Get the get-well cards ... dude's project is _sick_.

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kajecounterhack
This is sort of old but yeah its cool right? There are also people using
candles as the IR source. I'm not sure how that works...

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amichail
Is there a research contribution here?

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thaumaturgy
As gently as I can manage ...

At the end of the video is a URL for his website. It is
<http://johnnylee.net/>

His website is pretty neat. It includes more of his Wii remote projects --
including his interactive whiteboard which I think is even more interesting --
and it includes a link to his academic pursuits.

Following the "Academics" link, you'll find that his thesis project is
"Projector-Based Location Discovery and Tracking", which takes his whiteboard
hobby a couple of steps further.

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ivankirigin
I just tipped him at <http://tipjoy.com> for this url:
<http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/projects/wii/>

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chrisconley
this is one of the coolest things I've seen. ever.

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PStamatiou
wow

