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 I’ll be presenting a session on building your own holiday musical light show using Phidget boards and .NET at this month’s Tech Valley User Group. I’ve previously written an article about this topic on the Coding4Fun site, and there will be a full chapter on this in our upcoming “Coding4Fun: 10 .NET Programming Projects for Wiimote, YouTube, World of Warcraft, and More ” book. Here are the session details…
Abstract: This month, learn how to build an animated light show set to music, much like the famous holiday light show videos you may have seen on YouTube. This session will cover how to build the hardware, how to build the software, and how to combine them to create a synchronized musical show for your home. When: Tuesday November 18th, 2008 - 6:30-9PM Where: VersaTrans Solutions, Latham, NY Hope to see you at the session!
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I previously talked about my WiiEarthVR project shown at PDC project, and now I have posted the article for the application up at the Coding4Fun site. Full source code is available. You’ll need some hardware to make this go, namely a Wiimote, Nunchuk, Wii Fit Balance Board and a pair of Vuzix VR920 glasses, but the hardware can be toggled on or off depending on your own setup. The VR920 glasses are pretty cool in that they also work with a variety of FPS games on your PC with a custom driver they include. The article will, among other things, teach you how to use Virtual Earth 3D from a managed host (i.e. a WinForms app, not a web page), how to talk to the Wiimote, Nunchuk and Wii Fit Balance Board, how to retrieve the head tracking data from the VR920 glasses from .NET, and how to draw stereoscopic 3D images to the VR920 glasses from .NET. Quite a bit packed in there… Anyway, have a read and, as always, questions and comments are welcome.
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 A new version of my managed Wiimote library for .NET has been released. You can find version 1.6 up at CodePlex now. The changes are as follows:
v1.6.0.0 - Added "center of gravity" calculation to the Wii Fit Balance Board (thanks to Steven Battersby)
- Structs are now marked [Serializable] (suggested by Caio)
- Battery property is now a float containing the calculated percentage of battery remaining
- BatteryRaw is the byte value that used to be stored in the Battery property
- WiimoteTest app now reads extensions properly when inserted at startup
- Exposed HID device path in new HIDDevicePath property on Wiimote object
- Changed the time delay on writes to 50ms from 100ms...this should improve responsiveness of setting LEDs and rumble
I feel like I’m running out of things to implement and bugs to fix. I know that’s not true. So, I want to hear from the people using my library… What features/bugs do you want to see added/fixed? Please leave a comment here or contact me directly so I can create a master list. Thanks!
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 We finally have an official cover! This is likely exciting to no one but me (and Dan)…
Dan and I are working on the very final round of edits and formatting. The book goes to the printer next week and it should be available the first week of December according to Amazon. So what are you waiting for? Order now! :) And be sure to visit our book’s website. The chapter items will be filled in as we near the official release so you can get a head start on the book’s content.
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While at PDC2008 we shot an episode of This Week on Channel 9. If you feel the need to waste 13 minutes of your life on a PDC recap with me, Dan Fernandez, Scott Hanselman and Clint Rutkas, then this is the video for you. I have embedded the video below, but you can also click through to the main page to watch or download the video in a variety of formats. This Week on C9: PDC recap and Halloween with Scott Hanselman, Clint Rutkas, and Brian Peek
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 Well, PDC2008 is over. I had a lot of fun, met a ton of interesting and fun people, and learned about a lot of exciting new technologies. I hope to make it back out there next year.
Our PDC2008 session video has been posted up at Channel 9 along with the PowerPoint slide deck. In this session you will learn about four of our current projects: WiiEarthVR by myself, InnerTube by Dan Fernandez, TwitterVote by Clint Rutkas and BabySmash by Scott Hanselman. If you’d like to check out the video, you can watch it “live” or download the deck and video in various formats with the following links: Source code for all projects will be available soon and I’ll provide an update when it’s available. WiiEarthVR will also have its own Coding4Fun article within a week or two. InnerTube and TwitterVote are also featured in depth in our new book, “Coding4Fun: 10 .NET Programming Projects for Wiimote, YouTube, World of Warcraft, and More”, which comes out very soon. As always, questions and comments are welcome on the session. Thanks!
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 Update: Looks like the link has expired since PDC is now over. Thanks to all who downloaded!
At PDC2008 we have been giving away printouts of our first chapter and table of contents for our new book, “Coding4Fun: 10 .NET Programming Projects for Wiimote, YouTube, World of Warcraft, and More” to anyone who drops by the Coding4Fun area. We ran out of copies early today, so for those of you at PDC (and anyone else for that matter) that’s interested in taking a look at the (not really properly formatted in all places) first chapter of the book in PDF format, you can do so by visiting http://oreilly.com/go/mspdc . This chapter covers how to build a simple 2D game named Alien Attack using XNA 3.0. This link will die within the next few days, so download soon. Any questions and comments are welcome, as always…enjoy!
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Time to talk a little bit about my PDC demo… About a year ago, I wrote an application to control Virtual Earth 3D with the Wiimote named WiiEarth and a corresponding Coding4Fun article on how it was done. Since that time VE3D has been updated several times and code changes have broken my application. Since their API is undocumented and unsupported, it was bound to happen. Here’s a video of the old WiiEarth application: For PDC this year, I decided to write a new version of WiiEarth, now named WiiEarthVR, using the Wiimote and some additional hardware, namely the Wii Fit Balance Board and a pair of Vuzix VR920 glasses. Using the Balance Board, the user can shift their center of gravity (i.e. lean) and control the VE3D environment as if they were on a hovering glider.  
The VR920 glasses contain sensors to allow head tracking in 3 degrees of freedom. A very simple API provides a way to determine the yaw, pitch and roll of the glasses which can be directly used by VE3D. And finally, the glasses also support stereoscopic 3D imagery. Simply, this provides a very easy way to give the illusion of true 3D images with depth using the glasses. By rendering a frame for the left eye and a frame for the right eye, each slightly shifted from the center, your eyes will combine the images together into a single three dimensional image, much like those Magic Eye pictures (It’s a sailboat!). The final application gives you a very immersive 3D experience using VE3D that can be controlled directly by your own body. It’s pretty neat to fly around the Las Vegas strip or Manhattan and watch the buildings actually stick out three dimensionally as you lean around the Balance Board. If you’ll be at PDC2008, stop by the Coding4Fun Lounge to see the application in action, or sit in on our session “Coding4Fun: Windows Presentation Foundation Animation, YouTube, iTunes, Twitter, and Nintendo's Wiimote” to learn how it was made. After I return home from PDC, I will be writing a Coding4Fun article and releasing the source so you can give it a try at home, assuming you own all of the required hardware…
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 Anyone heading out to PDC2008 this year? I will be in attendance with (hopefully!) a new Wiimote project and perhaps a few old ones as well. More details on that when the project is a tiny bit further. We will also be giving away a free chapter of our new book “Coding4Fun: 10 .NET Programming Projects for Wiimote, YouTube, World of Warcraft, and More” to lucky PDC attendees at the O'Reilly booth.
I will also be co-presenting a lunch session at PDC: Title: Coding4Fun: Windows Presentation Foundation Animation, YouTube, iTunes, Twitter, and Nintendo's Wiimote
Date/Time: Tuesday, October 28th, 12:45pm-1:30pm
Speakers: Dan Fernandez, Scott Hanselman, Brian Peek, Clint Rutkas
Room: 403AB
Abstract: Spend time with Coding4Fun authors as they walk through some DIY Development projects: TwitterVote, Wiimote, InnerTube, and BabySmash. You can add this session to your agenda by visiting the PDC site and searching for “Coding4Fun”. If anyone will be attending, let me know so we can meet up for lunch, dinner or a drink. Hope to see you there!
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I’ve received information on a few spiffy Wiimote projects using my Managed Wiimote Library in the last couple weeks that everyone should check out… Wiimote Tracking System Using 3 Wiimotes by Nikolai This project uses 2 Wiimotes as cameras and a 3rd covered in IR LEDs to create a tracking and gesture recognition system. Check out the video below. Wiirtual.Earth - A WPF Virtual Earth 3D Experiment featuring the Nintendo Wiimote by Michael Koester A pretty spiffy WPF UI integrating Virtual Earth 3D and the Wiimote. Source code and more information available at the site linked above. 
Great projects!
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