Nintendo Wii Fanboy

Forget Wii parties: the hot new trend is creating a 3D interface that you can manipulate with your fingers via the Wii. We can only guess that Minority Report, Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, and other media are heavily influencing people who want their virtual interfaces right now and see the Wii as a path to the future.

Using our new hero Johnny Lee's efforts as a springboard, the guys at Cynergy Labs took the interactive interface and ran with it. With infrared gloves and a Wii remote, a picture is disassembled, reassembled, and moved around on the screen before our very eyes -- and everything is manipulated in mid-air, no actual touching required. The gloves allow for a more delicate (and accurate) range of movements, as is demonstrated later in the video, as they pair the set-up with an interface similar to Microsoft Surface for a distance-enhanced multi-touch experience.

All we can say is: move over, robots. We've got to get busy welcoming our new fingertip overlords.

While this may not be quite as exciting as Wii hacking, it's still worth noting. Johnny Lee is not alone in his experimentation with the Wii remote -- in fact, he's influencing others, like this Thai blogger. Take that banner and run with it, DIYers. We can only hope that developers are paying attention. We promise we won't complain about buying extra peripherals if you can deliver a truly unique experience!

This video isn't quite as polished as Johnny Lee's, but it does have one thing in its favor, and that's Spider-man.

Who knew that having a dome could be so cool? Paul Bourke outfitted one to create an immersive environment that he could steer through with a Wii remote. Using a data projector and specialized software on his MacBook Pro, he was able to display navigable movies on the hollow half-sphere.

Considering its accelerometers and bluetooth functionality, the remote seems perfect as a low-cost interface device for this kind of setup, but Paul found that though the controller is usable, it isn't as accurate as he'd like. We hope that doesn't stop someone from creating a fully-developed astronomy simulation out of this! Check past the post break for video of the experiment in action.

[Via Metafilter]

The defining use for the Wii Opera browser, is, of course, watching all the insanity of YouTube on your fancy-big TV. The site, however, is not quite conducive to the low-resolution viewing conditions found on the Wii, and is thus rather inconvenient to browse effectively.

Enter: SofaTube. A website dedicated to the perusing of not only YouTube but also the Revver library of videos, using a convenient drag-and-drop interface and large text for easy reading. So sit back, relax, and enjoy that Opie and Anthony video one more time ... it's that easy.

(That link involves some NSFW and rather gross comedy, though we can't seem to take our eyes off it. Click at your own risk.)

[via Joystiq]

Matt must have slept with Perrin or something, because IGN got their grubby mitts on a Wii debugging unit and a few games, to boot. On the latest IGN Weekly, Matt spends around ten minutes going through the Wii interface (mainly, the options menu) in detail. The menu seems to confirm the existence of one Wii code per system, as opposed to per game, which should make matchmaking at least slightly more convenient. He goes through Sound, Screen, Parental Controls, Sensitivity Options, and pretty much everything you'll see come November 19th. It's worth a watch, so check it out.