Changing Tides

Johnny Lee demos his wiimote whiteboard and wiimote headtracking/3D applications at TED 2008.

Uwe Schmidt has made an excellent Mac OS X version of wiimote whiteboard in Java (he also has a cross-platform version available).  It is available from his website - http://www.uweschmidt.org/wiimote-whiteboard - and includes TUIO support for multitouch.

Lots more information about Johnny Lee’s projects and other peoples additions to them is available on the Wiimote Project site.

I’ve just read a book called Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds about how to make more effective presentations. Like many good ideas, it seems very simple and straight forward when you read it.


Some ideas from Presentation Zen:

…keep these three words in mind always: simplicity, clarity, brevity. (p43)

If your presentation is successful, the audience will have no idea how many slides you used, nor will they care. (p60)

…remember that there are three components to your presentation - the slides, your notes, and the handout… (p67)

Information plus emotion and visualization wrapped in unforgettable anecdotes are the stuff that stories are made of. (p82)

Today’s presentations increasingly share more in common with a documentary film than an overhead transparency. (p135)

He quotes from an article by Anna Patty in the Sydney Morning Herald to support his view that the current use of Powerpoint bullet point, text presentations is "Really Bad Powerpoint". Anna’s article is available online (Research points the finger at PowerPoint by Anna Patty, SMH, 4 April 2007) and I liked these quotes from it:

"The use of the PowerPoint presentation has been a disaster," Professor Sweller said. "It should be ditched."

"It is effective to speak to a diagram, because it presents information in a different form. But it is not effective to speak the same words that are written, because it is putting too much load on the mind and decreases your ability to understand what is being presented."

• Carl.Kenner - GlovePIE
  GlovePIE stands for Glove Programmable Input Emulator. It doesn’t have to be used with VR Gloves, but it was originally started as a system for emulating Joystick and Keyboard Input using the Essential Reality P5 Glove. Supports Wiimotes.
  (tags: wiimote computer_interface)
• wiimotetuio - Google Code
  WiimoteTUIO is an Wiiremote application that sends out the current X & Y locations of all IR sources found (up to 4 ir sources) by TUIO messages.
  (tags: wiimote multitouch computer_interface)

Today’s post on Smashing Magazine has interesting examples of cutting edge display and user interface technology.

15 Stunning Cutting-Edge Gadgets and Technologies | Monday Inspiration | Smashing Magazine
In this post we present stunning examples of cutting edge technology which is already reality today or will become reality in 2008. Please notice that some videos might not provide you with a concrete idea of what the technology offers, e.g. it’s impossible to display the advantages of 3D-TV using videos produced by a 2D-video-camera.

I particularly liked the “Funky Forest” installation and seeing how the children enjoyed interacting with it.

Funky Forest
Funky Forest’ is an interactive ecosystem where children create trees with their body and then divert the water flowing from the waterfall to the trees to keep them alive. The health of the trees contributes to the overall health of the forest and the types of creatures that inhabit it.

The article also mentions some of the possibilities for using a Nintendo Wiimote to make interesting user interfaces for computers. As well as showing Johnny Chung Lee’s Wiimote experiments it links to a demo by Mike Rouse building on Johnny’s idea of tracking infrared lights on your hands. He has made an interface similar to Microsoft Surface using gloves with infrared lights in them and the wiimote to track them.

The Coolest Gloves Ever?