We create Wii-mote whiteboard.

In today’s update we are saluting the inventiveness of Johnny Lee.  Here at Culture Sculptor we love low-cost no-cost creative business solutions.  Check out the big brain on Johnny Lee! He’s created an interface that allows people to use Wiimotes from the popular Nintendo game consoles to facilitate an interactive white-board experience.  Total solution cost for this is about $60 if you already have the projector, and can adequately replace a multi-thousand dollar investment.  Here’s a You Tube video where he explains:

Neat huh?  Yeah, we liked it too.  So much so that we had to try it ourselves.

Our Experiment:
First we began with the computer.  Our consultants now use Acer Aspire One 8.9inch Mini-laptops for their field work.  They are powerful for their petite size, have plenty of storage at 160GB, 5.5hr battery life, and are way less cumbersome than traditionally sized machines when setting up presentations in a client’s workspace.  At a surprising sticker price of just $349 these were a great value for us.  (Now available for $299!) For this experiment we had to outfit ours with Bluetooth adapters so they could talk with the wiimotes ($24).

http://www.acer.com/aspireone/

We paired these with the Dell M109S On-the-go Projectors, another tiny solution.  Even though it requires a low-light environment, the portability factor and ease of use in a client’s workspace more than compensates.

We then used this site to get the basics of the IR pen down, which we found very easy to make and quite a bit of fun.
http://www.terracode.com/IR_Pen/DIY_IR_Pen.html
End result:
A remarkably portable and fully functional interactive whiteboard experience we can use to benefit our clients.

Total cost for every component we used in this experiment, including the laptop, bluetooth adapter, projector, tri-pod to mount the projector (this version really needs one), pen parts, wiimote (which we also mounted on a tiny tri-pod) was under $1000.  That’s remarkable when you consider a normal interactive whiteboard can set you back in excess of $3000.

What we like most about it:
We can project a marketing piece, logo design or presentation onto a conference table and allow up to 4 people to write notes and mark up the space at once.  This is great fun for collaborative brainstorming sessions.

To learn more about Johnny Lee’s projects please visit his site.
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/

Here’s another resource for Wii to computer software, hints on making your own IR pen and more.  There’s now a wealth of information out there about this process.