Wii Wizardry on a Dime (or Two)

Short on mullah but want to impress your friends? Your boss? That hunk or hottie down the hall? And if you're a teacher, your students and fellow faculty? Then meet Johnny Chung Lee: Nintendo Wii expert and tech wizard researcher at Carnegie Mellon University -- and enter a tech wonderland that's way too much fun (and affordable) to ignore.

As his rocket rise to YouTube stardom attests, Lee's your ideal model geek: someone who thinks about technology and innovation with a way-cool social conscience. A conscience high on high-tech toys, that is. For, in Lee's innovative hands, high-tech need not be exclusive or high-cost.

As the wonderful website "TED" (Technology, Entertainment, Design) explains: "Building sophisticated educational tools out of cheap parts, Johnny Lee demos his cool Wii Remote hacks, which turn the $40 video game controller into a digital whiteboard, a touchscreen and a head-mounted 3-D viewer."

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/johnny_lee_demos_wii_remote_hacks.html

Lee wants to make applications for hands-on tech tools available and affordable to everyone, and thus help bridge the "digital divide" between the people of privileged and developing countries across the globe. To Lee, it's all of us or none.

With that ethic in mind, Lee's fun with creativity is an inspiration. Check out the YouTube videos below, and let your mind be blown. The implications are enormous, and the possibilities limited only by your enthusiasm and excitement. Consider how many different ways his ideas can be applied across diverse areas and fields (academic, professional, commercial, scientific, governmental, non-profit, etc.). It's enough to make you want to switch your major to engineering and help save the world, one cool and thoughtful innovation at a time. But, as "Innovation Journalists," we can do the same and more!

So, like Lee, see the connections across the disciplines, and across national boundaries and cultures. Make cool stuff happen! You just might become one of the architects of an entirely new wave of journalism -- one that puts the people in the driver seat of innovation and democracy, pooling more cool ideas together than we could ever dream alone.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhSR_6-Y5Kg&feature=user
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/

- Misako M.