(Friday!) Wii-mote Tracker Fun!

It's friday night, which means I get to do something non-work related, and tonight i'm shut in due to a blizzard. Today I came across a cool video of some neat tricks using wii-mote C# libraries to create awesome human interactive display devices so tonight I decided to implement the infrared pen used in these demo's to try them for myself. The results are amazing! I suggest everyone who has a wii to run to radio shack and buy some parts to build a pen. Mine is very 'ad-hoc' so to speak with a switch controlled with my off hand, but it still works great. Check out the site here. I've also added it to my new links section (*its the only link so far). So far I have tried the 'whiteboard' application on both my laptop (14") and desktop (30") monitors. At close distances (of the wiimote) the resolution of the wiimote is acceptable for all but fine resolutions. At a large distance when the wiimote is 10+ feet from my 30" the display starts showing characteristics of its limitations. In the image in this post you will see a grid- which was 'drawn' by my light pen when the wiimote was ~10 feet away on the -> right side of the screen. It is visible that the resolution becomes worse on the left hand side of the screen and is better on the right (as seen by the squiggle marks, it appears it is able to 'draw' between boxes). The angle here is likely due to calibration.