Head Tracking for Desktop with Wii

Johnny Lee talks about yet another awesome way to interact with your computer.

As of June 2008, Nintendo has sold nearly 30 million Wii game consoles. This significantly exceeds the number of Tablet PCs in use today according to even the most generous estimates of Tablet PC sales. This makes the Wii Remote one of the most common computer input devices in the world. Johnny Lee's projects are an effort to explore and demonstrate applications that the millions of Wii Remotes in world readily support.

Using the infrared camera in the Wii remote and a head mounted sensor bar (two IR LEDs), you can accurately track the location of your head and render view dependent images on the screen. You don't actually need the Wii console. This effectively transforms your display into a portal to a virtual environment. The display properly reacts to head and body movement as if it were a real window creating a realistic illusion of depth and space.



Thanks to Johnny Chung Lee, Carnegie Mellon University for this enlightenment. For more information and software visit: http://johnnylee.net/

Interesting GUI Concept

I just came across a very interesting 10/GUI concept video. On the frontpage of their website it says:

Over a quarter-century ago, Xerox introduced the modern graphical user interface paradigm we today take for granted. That it has endured is a testament to the genius of its design. But the industry is now at a crossroads: New technologies promise higher-bandwidth interaction, but have yet to find a truly viable implementation. 10/GUI aims to bridge this gap by rethinking the desktop to leverage technology in an intuitive and powerful way.

10/GUI from C. Miller on Vimeo.

Makes you wonder what the future of the Linux desktop will look like.

Source: http://10gui.com/

UNetbootin will make a bootable liveUSB drive

UNetbootin allows for the installation of various Linux/BSD distributions to a partition or USB drive, so it's no different from a standard install, only it doesn't need a CD. It can create a dual-boot install, or replace the existing OS entirely.

UNetbootin has built-in support for many distributions. It works with Linux and Windows. Check it out for yourself:

http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/