Johnny Lee

Johnny Chung Lee is perhaps the most famous and coolest among the Wii Remote (or Wiimote) hackers. – Man, that makes me jealous. I could so nearly have been him. But compared to him, I’m only the Radek Zelenka of Wiimote hacking.

My favourite Wiimote project of his is this one:

You don’t actually have to have the Sensor Bar on your head and the Wiimote on your TV. Doing it that way you are actually throwing away valuable information about head rotation (only needed for stereoscopic 3D with this kind of VR) and giving yourself a smaller range that you can move around in (since the Wiimote camera has a lower FOV than the sensor bar does, and if the Wiimote was on your head it would turn to face the screen when you do). The reason why Johnny Lee does it the backwards way, is because the Wiimote is heavier, more awkward and hard to mount on your head.

This isn’t a new invention, it’s actually based on the original super-sized version by Carolina Cruz (no, not the Colombian model):

The virtual objects that appear to be attached to the woman’s wand controller are really drawn on the walls and floor several feet away. So are the laser beams you see coming out of her wand. And the illusion works perfectly when we move the camera, because the camera and the wand are very precisely tracked in 3D space and the images drawn on the wall are drawn exactly how they would look from that angle if they were really attached to the wand. There are 3 walls and a floor all at right angles, but you can hardly see the seams because it compensates for them being at right angles by drawing each individual screen with its own head-tracking algorithm. This is exactly the same as Johnny Lee is doing, but with several huge screens. This kind of Virtual Reality is called a CAVE, and costs several million dollars. It’s a lot more fun than a head-mounted display.

I actually implemented this same head tracking Virtual Reality on the computer long before Johnny Lee famously showed it. But I used an (even cheaper) Essential Reality P5 Glove on my head since Wii Remotes didn’t exist yet, and I used a monitor and a TV at right angles, and I added red/cyan 3D glasses. I made it so that it could be used in existing Direct3D games, and I played it with Hitman 2 (because it comes free with the glove) and Lord Of The Rings: Return Of The King. It was very cool. But I never finished it enough to release it, and never made a video. Maybe I will one day.

But why am I talking about Johnny Lee, Wii Remotes, and Virtual Reality gloves when this isn’t my GlovePIE blog?

Because Johnny Lee was recruited onto the Xbox: Project Natal team! And this kind of head-tracked virtual reality is coming to Project Natal. The Milo and Kate game is known to include this feature, and hopefully all the other games do to.

Johnny Lee’s blog post is here: http://procrastineering.blogspot.com/2009/06/project-natal.html