If we thought TED was cool before, now we are convinced we MUST find some way to get in. We’re still stunned by this video from the most recent TED conference of Johnny Lee making a digital drawing board from a WII remote and a dry erase marker. We know that sounds a little MacGyverish, but the result is mind blowing. Using the inexpensive motion sensing technology in the WII remote, he’s built a pen that can have it’s motion tracked. The result is you can open photoshop, project it on a wall, and draw or paint with the pen like you would with traditional art mediums. Well, kind of like traditional mediums, minus all the buying brushes, charcoal, paint, thinner, rags, canvases, etc, and our favorite, no clean up.
We can imagine doing some pretty amazing performance pieces already. It’s safe to say that if guys like David Ellis can make amazing art from old paint cans they can go to town with recycled technology like this.
Lee also mentions another WII hack we posted on last year referring to 3-D motion sensing technology for video games that is also quite impressive (the earlier post gives a little bit better explanation of how this technology works and how simple it is). Could these two things be combined to create 3-D environments users could interact with? Is this the beginning of holographic video games? We’re guessing someone is working on this right now, and if any of you have any info this please post it in the comments section.

Debuting at the TED conference this week, Kluster is an interesting new idea site based on community involvement and very web 2.0 hive mind mentality. When you consider that wikipedia has virtually replaced encyclopedias as the primary place to get information you start realize the power that a large group of people on the web can collectively generate.
The premise of Kluster is that projects can be submitted, driven, voted upon, and executed in an open source environment, kind of like if threadless were for more than just T-shirts. While we haven’t had a chance to see the results of this yet, we think the premise is quite interesting, and hope to see what participants do with it.