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Comment by magicalist | Hacker News Reader

"- Johnny Lee and the ATAP-Project Tango Team"

Johnny Lee was the guy with the awesome Wii Controller demos back in 2007 (can't believe it's been that long).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw

edit: here's the full set of demos: http://johnnylee.net/projects/wii/ (also, I'm assuming it's the same guy, but his site says he's at Google now)

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I am so happy to see a familiar face when I played the video.

Back in 07/08 when he demoed his hacks in TED it really blew my mind. [1]

I was really hoping someone would pick him up and let him loose on some projects.

I guess Google did just that.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0H1zrLZwPjQ

He worked on the Kinect project at Microsoft as well. In fact he put up the prize money for the Open Kinect contest run by Adafruit to develop drivers for the Kinect.

http://procrastineering.blogspot.com/2011/02/windows-drivers...

I was Google when they were trying to hire him, he turned them down to go work at Microsoft. Its interesting to see him at Google these days. I was really inspired by his projector/Wii hacks. I even built a couple with some of those pico projector units that Woot gets now and then for $100. My interest was building a simpler structured scanner for doing 3D printing.

Watching the demo in the 2nd half of the I thought, cool I can watch video in 3D without wearing goggles. And than I heard the head tracking really works only when 1 user is using it. Well dang it, I will sacrifice spending time with wife if I can watch a movie in 3D without wearing goggles...

I see that his focus moved from living room TV/game console to a mobile device...

Yeah, I was really disappointed at the time that Nintendo didn't move on it, as it obviously worked really well out of the box, with no hardware modifications needed.

It could have made an awesome additional experience to some games (even if it was optional), and they could have done it with no accessory required.

I tried out his demo back then and unfortunately it isn't as impressive in real life as it is on video. The problem is that at the distance you usually have your television the most important depth cue is the stereo separation of images, i.e. what you get when wearing 3D-glasses.

So while the objects move around as if you would move in relation to them - your brain still tells you that the image is painted on the surface of the television.

I think he was tech lead for Kinect at Microsoft for a while, before Google snatched him.

Awesome, I thought I recognized him! I was talking about him recently to a friend. Those demos were inspiring and very cool.

Pretty awesome to see what he's been up too.

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