If you’re a teacher or give presentations regularly for work, you’ve probably heard of smartboards and wondered if they would be useful for your presentations. In short, they are likely to engage the audience well, allowing them to really follow what you are trying to teach them.
Now, if you just don’t have the budget for a full-fledged smart pad, here’s what you’ll love: this is a great way to use your Wii remote (Wiimote) and infrared pen as a smart board. Using a few cheap tools that you may already have along with some free software, you have the recipe for creating a Smartboard. It’s a great hour for open source and hacking popular gadgets!
Why Use Smartboard?
A bit of a back-up if you’re not entirely familiar with smartboards, essentially a smartboard is where your computer screen is projected onto a white screen and you can manipulate that projection as if it were a giant touch screen.
Here is a quick overview of what you can do with Smartboard:
- Use interactive sites in demos.
- Highlighting text when discussing.
- Draw to help explain complex processes.
- Record the entire lecture for review later.
- Play games in a group.
- Create data visualization when data is received.
- Check out this presentation for more ideas.
Wiimote Smartboard Basics
Johnny Chung Lee is the designer of the Wiimote Smartboard. Full instructions and a YouTube demo are available on its website. Basically, the Wiimote Smartboard works like this: The Wii Remote can monitor up to four infrared signals. So if you project your computer screen onto a white screen (or just use a large LCD monitor) and point the Wii Remote in the same direction, you can interact with the computer using up to four infrared knobs.
