Johnny Chung Lee’s VR Wii-hack turned a lot of heads when he released a YouTube video of it earlier this year. Our Curt Harler had a chance to talk with Lee about his hacks, his research, and where he sees motion sensing going:

Johnny Chung Lee turned Wii inside-out (or, perhaps it was back-end front) in a clever Wii hack that allows viewers to see 3-D video on a TV set .

Lee is a doctoral candidate at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh. He did an undergraduate degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Virginia and then went into the PhD program in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) at Carnegie-Mellon. HCI focuses on the relationship between people and technology, and how they can interact with each other.

“Motion sensing and motion capture is a very rich form of input and I’ve enjoyed finding opportunities to include it in my work when it makes sense,” he says.

His focus is primarily on developing new interface technology such as new sensing approaches, input devices, or control systems. “I do a bit of hardware and software,” he explains.
“Computers are one of the most versatile tools for doing just about anything these days,” Lee continues. “If you know how to shape the hardware and the software to your desires, you can execute most of the things you can imagine.”

“Dreaming up new ways to interact with and control information is fun for me and, fortunately, that’s my job,” he says.

While his Wii project is a cool hack of an existing product, motion-enabled technology needs to have some innovative ideas to springboard from in the future. “One way I think about interactive technology is that we aren’t done until we have the technology to build the holodeck from Star Trek,” he says. He is serious about that analogy. “There is a long way between that vision and where we are now,” he says.

He sees motion-enabled technology moving out of the office or manufacturing floor environment and into the area beyond simple device technology. “Endowing computing systems with knowledge about our bodies, movements, and intentions is going to be essential in making any progress toward that,” Lee says. “I expect technology to become much more sensor heavy in the near future as it becomes affordable and reasonable to build devices that don’t simply run office applications.”

Still, he sees a lot of potential in working with other “off the shelf” items…things that he feels might be modified to get cool results, similar to his Wii hack.
He says it is a little bit hard to define “off-the-shelf” in this context. “There are packaged integrated components like accelerometers, gyroscopes, magnetometers, and IR cameras,” he notes. “I have also seen some very clever things done with simple light sensors, microphones, or air pressure sensors. There’re more sophisticated components like galvanic skin response, and electromygraph devices which yield some very interesting biometric sensing and input possibilities.”

In Lee’s book, it does not stop there, either. “There are general technologies that I think are interesting,” he says. He points to things such as capacitive coupling/touch sensing, frustrated total internal reflection (in plastics and liquids), and ferro fluids. “All of these are interesting building blocks that could enable fun ideas,” he says.