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.

Armed with nothing but his hopes and dreams (and a large array of infrared LEDs, and also reflective tape, and let's throw "dreams" in there again), YouTube user Johnny Lee designed a method for using the Wiimote to track his finger movements. Basically, by sticking reflective tape to his fingertips and shining a bunch of infrared light on them, he made his fingers into a moving sensor bar!

The Wii Remote picks up the reflected light and tracks the fingers' motion as if it were Wiimote motion. He then demonstrated some custom PC software that uses this gesture-based interface, manipulating some grids around by pointing at them.

This is super cool, obviously, but it also gives us a weird idea: if this works, then it means that you can set the Wiimote on top of your TV and use the sensor bar as a controller. Except for the motion sensing, and, uh, all the buttons.

[Via Joystiq]