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Researcher provides another Wii Remote hack, this time to help business users create interactive whiteboards on the cheap.

You might remember the incredible Wiimote hacks by by Johnny Chung Lee, who gave us head tracking demo for desktop VR displays. Lee, a PhD student in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University is back with some more useful Wiimote hacks, this time to turn any surface into an interactive whiteboard. He shows how to turn a wall into a whiteboard with a DIY LED pen interface, and also how to create a multi-touch desktop or laptop LCD display using 2 LED pens. These are incredibly useful ideas for creating inexpensive interactive displays.

Using an LED array and some reflective tape, you can use the infrared camera in the Wii remote to track objects, like your fingers, in 2D space. This lets you interact with your computer simply by waving your hands in the air similar to the interaction seen in the movie "Minority Report". The Wiimote can track upto 4 points simultaneously. The multipoint grid software is a custom C# DirectX program.

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/projects/wii/

Jakob Nielsen reveals the winners of a competition to identify the 10 best-designed application user interfaces for 2008.

The winners:

• Campaign Monitor by Eyeblaster (Israel): Integrated management of multiple advertising campaigns for media buyers.
• CMSBox by CMSBox (Switzerland): Content management system
• FotoFlexer by Arbor Labs (USA): Photo editor
• PRISMAprepare by Océ (The Netherlands): Print shop software.
• Seating Management by Magellan Network and DesignBox (USA): Hostess-stand reservation book for restaurants.
• SQL diagnostic manager by Idera (USA): Database performance monitoring and diagnostics
• SugarSync by Sharpcast (USA): Synchronizing files across multiple computers.
• SuperSaaS by SuperSaaS (The Netherlands): Creating and hosting scheduling and reservation systems.
• Wufoo by Infinity Box, Inc. (USA): Online forms, surveys, invitations, and payments.
• Xero by Xero (New Zealand): Accounting for small businesses.

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/application-design.html

Bill Buxton gives a lecture at the Stanford University Human-Computer Interaction Seminar (CS 547, June 1, 2007) giving an excellent deep dive into some of the topics in his book, Sketching User Experiences.

Designing for experience comes with a whole new level of complexity. This is especially true in this emerging world of information appliances, reactive environments, and ubiquitous computing, where, along with those of their users, we have to factor in the convoluted behaviors of the products themselves. In this talk, Bill discusses the design process itself, from the perspective of methods, organization, and composition.

His discussion of the necessity of sketching and ideation in the design process ultimately describes what design is about. While engineering might be about getting the design right, design is about getting the right design. To arrive at the right design, we have to be willing to produce many ideas, to present and argue them, and to want to be wrong so that we can learn and improve on what comes out of the design critique.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xx1WveKV7aE