The last day before I started my working life had to be memorable… In a geeky kind of way, of course! So I decided to try out some of the extremely cool stuff that Johnny Lee has made, more specifically the Wiimote head tracking project (check out all of his Wii projects here). Breaking some old sunglasses, adding a few IR diodes and I was set…

I am really amazed at the things that Johnny Lee has come up with. If you haven’t seen his videos, have a look at them here – they are extremely innovative and cool. The easiest/coolest one for me to make was the head tracking, so I broke an old pair of sunglasses and went to convert them to ILE-glasses, Infrared Light Emitting glasses (ok, just made that word up, but you heard it here first!).

I honestly can’t give you the specs, because I actually just grabbed them from an old board (used to disrupt the cars we built for ECA2B – you can see our car on my Youtube profile). Some tape, four wires and a couple of diodes, resistors, switches and AAA batteries later, I had these beautiful glasses.

And they look even better on!



And according to my phone camera, the diodes are working (the camera can capture IR light – nice way to check if the batteries in your remote are dead, by the way).



Then I added the Wiimote using BlueSoleil and taped the Wiimote to the screen (yes, I did the tape work myself!).



And that’s all you need for that project! You really should try to build this yourself if you have the resources needed – it is quite amazing an amazing effect to wear them! Here’s a small video I shot (the same way Johnny Lee did). It gives you a small idea ofhow cool it is, but you really should try them outfor yourself to get the full effect.

I also tried out the Wiimote Whiteboard, but the switches I had used for the glasses weren’t really suitable. But it still showed that you can make a cheap interactive whiteboard with a great resolution very easily.

(Credits: Lasse Kieffer from Universal Robots for giving me a hand with the hardware and of course Johnny Lee)