Making Some Wii Modifications

Johnny Chung Lee has achieved some fanfare modifying Wii's attributes. Now he'd like to bring touch- and motion-based interactivity to your desktop

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Over the past 12 months, a series of quirky but compelling videos uploaded to Google's (GOOG) YouTube have been delighting hackers, designers, and tech tinkerers worldwide. The videos, which feature modifications of Nintendo's (NTDOY) popular Wii console to create everything from mind-boggling 3D images to interactive whiteboards, have earned their creator a cultlike following and inspired countless other experiments.

The four- to five-minute films are the handiwork of Johnny Chung Lee, a 28-year-old graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University. Lee, who was recruited to the university by the well-known lecturer and computer scientist Randy Pausch (BusinessWeek.com, 11/21/07), will earn his PhD in human-computer interaction later this spring.

He gravitates toward projects that recreate the intricate interactions found in hot-selling devices including Apple's (AAPL) iPhone—but at dramatically reduced cost. His experiments demonstrate how simple, inexpensive modifications of common gaming technologies could be used to foster collaborative innovation in a business or research environment.

BusinessWeek reporter Matt Vella recently spoke with Lee about the common themes in his research, the future of motion and multitouch technology, and why exactly he chose to use the Wii as a vehicle for some of his experiments. (For examples of Lee's work, see the video slide show.)

What attracted you to the Wii originally?

A few years ago, I was playing with accelerometers [gyroscopic devices that sense motion]. These are very interesting interaction devices that researchers have been looking at for a couple of decades and that could always do neat things. Seeing one in a game device was a little bit overdue. A few years ago, when I was doing research with Microsoft (MSFT), I was one of several people trying to get the Xbox group to include an accelerometer in the controller, but they decided not to for cost reasons.

So when the Wii remote came out and it became public that there was a motion sensor in it, I was very excited about it. And then the development community started reverse engineering it and discovered it had all these other capabilities, like an infrared camera, an expansion port, and pressure-sensitive buttons—and it hooked up to a computer relatively easily. All of those factors, plus the low cost, the high availability, the high capability, and its ease of use, made it very attractive to play with.

So it's really the technology in game machines that interests you more than gaming per se?

My interest is interaction techniques and interaction capability. So I'm more interested in systems or tools that allow you to manipulate data or a computational system more effectively or efficiently. Gaming technology just happens to be one of the more rapidly evolving platforms for interaction techniques. On the desktop, you're kind of stuck with the keyboard and mouse, and it's very hard to convince people to move away from that. The cultural environment in gaming is much more dynamic, so almost anything goes. People are much more willing to adopt new ways of controlling a game, as we've seen recently with the Wii as well as games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero.

Do you feel that your projects share a common theme?

I try to look for simple opportunities that can dramatically change the distribution of technology. One way of doing that is by making things much simpler or much cheaper. For example, the Wii remote can dramatically reduce the cost of the whiteboard.