So, listening to a talk on Web 2.0 from the University of Salford. The presenter is talking about hacking the Wiimote. Although he’s warning us that we’re sitting in a TableTennis room in a sports hall, with a hastily constructed lab, it’s likely to go wrong at some point.

Wiimote uses bluetooth. It also has infrared recognition, so it should be aware of its position in 3D space (although there are 3rd party add-ons which give the wiimote full 3D relational positioning via gyroscopes). This relies upon the handset determining its position in relation to a fixed light source.

However, you can do the reverse. You can fix the handset and move the ligthsource. The wiimote can track four lightsources by default, but can be modified to track more. You can fix the wiimote to a tripod, and move a lightsource which can be tracked (in this case the UoS guy has modified a Dr Who Sonic Screwdriver to use an infrared LED).

Using Wii mouse drivers you can treat an LED light source as a mouse. The lightsource is calibrated against the screen, then used as a traditional mouse. Although I’ve no idea how he’s hacked his Sonic Screwdriver to represent mouseclicks. Even a laserpointer can be used.

Interwrite Office Mode (?), a whiteboard application traditionally used with their handheld virtual whiteboard hardware, can be used with the wiimote setup to draw on the slides and save their contents. It even has basic text recognition.

Essentially any surface can emulate a interactive whiteboard.

Don’t work with childen, animals, whiteboard, or gaffa tape.

[Just did a quick Google, and mouse-clicks are emulated by the LED momentarily being turned off.]