Chumby

Recently I came upon a device called the Chumby. If you haven't heard of it, the Chumby a compact computer that displays information from the web via wireless. It has a touchscreen, 2 usb 2.0 ports, an accelerometer and a squeeze sensor. Best of all, it is designed to be easily hacked both for software and hardware. Anyone can make widgets for the Chumby using Flash Lite 3.0 as well as a variety of other languages (Chumby is Linux based). The screen is 320*240 and the recommended framerate is 12fps. Looking over Chumby.com's wiki, it looks like things are very well documented with example files to download and try out.

I think the idea of the Chumby is very cool and I'm excited to try it out for myself. At $179.95 it is a little pricey but, it is exactly what could integrate the internetin new ways to affect our daily lives (especially with web 2.0 technology like RSS). Imagine having a Chumby in your kitchen, you could get recipes off the intenet, watch online video, listen to internet radio, check the weather and traffic while you have breakfast, and read the daily news. I myself would be interested in a Skype widget so I could use it like a phone.

There's a bunch of cool widgets and features already available for the Chumby at the official website: www.chumby.com.
So check it out for yourself.

Making Flash games for the Wii

Recently I was shopping at Circuit City and found something interesting. It was a program called my Wii Manager. This software that allows you to download, edit, and share your Mii characters; so far you might not be impressed. But what the software actually is, is much different. It includes a programmable input emulator with an archive of programs for using the Wiimote on the computer. So it allows you to relatively easily connect your Wiimote to your computer and receive and use its serial input to control your mouse. It runs without a UV sensor so all moving is done by tilting the Wiimote; the cool bit is that it can detect tilt, thrust, and some other movement as well as make the Wiimote vibrate and light up its LEDs.


The real reason why I bought the software was that it came with a Bluetooth dongle and the whole thing cost about $20. When I was searching for a single Bluetooth dongle, the prices were usually closer to $30. So with this software you not only get the dongle but the emulator with program archive and some documentation. For my money, this is a pretty good deal. The main thing that had been keeping me from playing with making Flash games for the Wii, was that it was too much work to figure out how to set everything up and get it working reliably before I could get to making games. So if you're curious about making Flash games for the Wii, check out my Wii Manager.

After setting everything up (took about half an hour of reading and fiddling about) I played with a couple of old Flash toys I made. The results were pretty encouraging. A while ago I started working on a gesture class that maps various types of mouse movement to specific gestures. The goal was to add a greater sense of immersion to gameplay through more familiar and intuitive interactions. When I tried playing with the old toys I made using this class, they mapped wonderfully to the Wiimote and the interaction felt nice. So I've decided to slowly make a bunch of minigames using the class which later on I'll put together in one larger game. This will take a while though since I'm still in the middle of redesigning my website. Hopefully I'll be able to squeeze in a minigame or two along the way. Once I've finished a couple of minigames, I'll post the code and the games at my website.