Residing in spaceland: Johnny Chung Lee’s imaginative work
February 3, 2008 | Edward Tufte
2 Comment(s)
See especially his Wii project on head tracking and the $14 Steadycam.
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/academic/
Topics: E.T.
See especially his Wii project on head tracking and the $14 Steadycam.
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/academic/
Yes, very interesting and creative. Now, what I have been thinking a little bit about is how to use some of those capabilities when exploring or presenting data and graphics. A data viewer that could use the movements and buttons of a wii to, for example, zoom and rotate a give section of the graph, transition smoothly between graphs of various variables, navigate a 3D graph, …
Some tools are there, e.g. libraries to interact with the wii, while others need some improvement, like the program to actually fiddle with the graphs as gapminder does. I am leaning towards an R session through a webserver.
Any other ideas on the kind of exact uses of the Wii or other similar tool? Other choices of platform?
Iago
Iago,
The first time “Wiimote” hacking popped onto my radar was for map/globe navigation, published over on Coding4Fun:
http://blogs.msdn.com/coding4fun/archive/2007/10/18/5506286.aspx
From Mr. Lee’s demo, you can see where that “spread-out” technique with the fingers moving apart can be used to zoom in and out of a map, but also to zoom in and out of pictures, like Jeff Hahn shows in his TED presentation of his multi-touch display:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/65
I think the great thing about Mr. Lee’s innovation here is that he’s demonstrated extremely cost-effective motion tracking.