Serious toys

A number of years ago, I did a hands-on project that demonstrated that a Nintendo Gameboy, an electronic hand-held game machine, could be used for serious applications. One of the intents of the article was to show that the 60 to 100 million Gameboy units that were being made obsolete by the Gameboy Advance did not need to go into the trash, but that they could find a new life as terminals for serious applications, including medical applications.

I did not anticipate this, but Nintendo has once again unwittingly created a platform that is spawning creative and unintended (and unsupported) uses of their equipment. For an example of some of these uses, visit Johnny Chung Lee’s Procrastineering website. Johnny has taken the Wii remote and used its ability to track four infrared blobs to accomplish some interesting applications, including finger-gesture tracking, a low-cost, interactive whiteboard, and a head-tracking application that could be a harbinger of yet a new way for people to interact with their systems. Check out the videos for each of these demonstrations.

It is my hope that Nintendo will encourage and support innovative new ways to use its equipment rather than letting another golden opportunity slip away like it did with the Gameboy handhelds. Lego, with its Mindstorms robotics platform, is a great example of how a company can decide to open up its platform and create something even larger. The Mindstorms product has grown so much that a commercially mature third-party tool, LabView from National Instruments, supports programming for the platform.

If you know of people creating or demonstrating new applications from existing end-products, please share them by posting about them in the comments for this post.