Surf The Planet Using Google Earth And The Wii Balance Board

This week at MacWorld the smart folks at Google showed off a really cool homebrew project using the Wii Balance Board, the Google Earth API,  and a web browser. Add in some open-source love and additional coding work from David Phillip Oster, a Google Earth iPhone Engineer, and you can now surf the (virtual) planet. I had a chance to check it out at the show and it’s really fun to fly around the planet using the balance board.

David uses a few different open source projects to make it all work, and he wrote his own code to get the BlueTooth in the Wii Balance Board to talk to a Mac. The project is called Earth Surfer and it will be available next week in the Google Mac Developer Playground, including source code.

Read more about it, including a video of the code in action, at the Google Lat Long blog. As happy new Wii Fit owners, I know we’ll be trying this at home as soon as we can!

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