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Find the little man on the boat yet, wiimote?

People have been hacking the $40 Wiimote to do expensive applications for awhile, like making a digital whiteboard for $50 in parts that has about 80% of the functionality of a $2,000 whiteboard, or making a head-mounted 3-D viewer for $10 plus the cost of a Wii (see video below).  Another Wiimote hack was recently discovered in the Netherlands:

[Willem] Luxemburg’s team aimed the Wiimote at a problem that can be very tricky for hydrologists: measuring evaporation on a body of water. [...] But [pressure sensor] equipment can run $500 or more, and still the measurements aren’t accurate [...]. The Wiimote could overcome the evaporation-measurement problems. It has a tri-axial accelerometer and a high-resolution, high-speed infrared camera, which can sense movement with better than 1 millimeter accuracy. [Ed. - well la dee da, your majesty]  Luxemburg’s team tested it in a floating evaporation pan, using a float with an LED. With a Wiimote aimed at the float, and some hacking and programming of the Wiimote’s output, they were able to get highly accurate, real-time data on water level wirelessly sent to a laptop.  The IR camera can track up to four LED lights at once, so scientists can use several floats to calculate the water’s plane. To be as accurate with pressure sensors, you’d need more and costlier units. [Wired]

Check out the head-mounted 3-D viewer below.  Why hasn’t the porn industry already adapted that?

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