The Tom Sawyer Of Innovation.(The Technologist)

Byline: Christopher Flavelle

When Nintendo released its Wii videogame console in December 2006, it was sold out before it hit the shelves. Stores had more advance orders than they could fill. The company went on to sell more than 20 million Wii consoles within the first year, outselling the next most popular gaming systems, the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3, combined. But the real significance of the Wii may come from another statistic: 500,000. That's the number of people who downloaded, in a single four-month period, Johnny

Chung Lee's software for turning the Wii's unique handset--which allows the player to control the action on screen with a wave of the hand--into something that has nothing to do with videogames: the "pen" for a digital whiteboard, on which people can write and draw from a distance. Lee is one of a growing community of programmers who have expropriated the technology behind the Wii for their own inventions, using it in ways Nintendo never intended. The result has been a groundswell of innovation that so far Nintendo wants no part of.

The Wii's remote handset--or, as fans dubbed it, the WiiMote--is the main reason for the game console's appeal. It has a motion sensor, and a tiny camera to track points of light from an infrared light emitter on top of the television. That allows the player to manipulate the action (whether the stroke of a pen or of a tennis racket) with the same wrist or arm motion used to produce a written word, or a topspin backhand, in real life. This unique ability to connect player to screen also makes Wii an irresistible target for amateur programmers, who have used the WiiMote to control everything from remote-control cars to robotic arms. Best of all, the WiiMote is within the budget of even the humblest basement wizard. "For $40, you get this little device that has LEDs, a rumble motor, a three-axis accelerometer, an infrared sensor and buttons," says Brian Peek, a developer for the software consulting firm ASPSOFT who builds new applications for the WiiMote in his spare time.

Last March, Peek posted what he calls a WiiMote library on his Web site--a collection of codes that other programmers can download, then use to build WiiMote applications of their own. Peek's library acts as a sort of translator between the WiiMote and a computer, "breaking the code of the WiiMote," says Peek. He estimates that his library has been downloaded tens of thousands of times. Lee, who does research on human-computer interaction at Carnegie Mellon University, used Peek's codes to design the WiiMote Whiteboard, then posted the software online free of charge, as well as instructions on how to create the hardware.