We experimented with our Wii-powered Smartboard project today – playing with the idea of rear projection.

We carted out projector, laptop, and Wiimote to the Bentley Centre – a long corridor of conference rooms sporting sliding glass doors which are divided into panels.  Shauna brought some fairly light bond, large format paper which we figured would do a good job of trapping light from the projector while allowing enough of the IR light from the pen to pass through for detection by the Wiimote on the other side of the glass.  We decided to tape the paper to the projector-side of the glass.   This turned out to be a great effect as the projector light on the light bond paper created an LCD-like effect on the users’ glass-only side.

The projector had a setting that inverted the image, so we didn’t need to reconfigure the laptop graphics display.  We connected the laptop to the university wireless and loaded up Google Earth in full screen in addition to free SmartBoard software allowing us to markup anything on the screen using an overlay.

We tried 2 pen designs – both of which worked quite well allowing us to navigate all of the Google Earth and overlay features with ease.  Our zipping about Google Earth attracted quite a bit of attention from passing students who stopped to watch, ask lots of great questions about the setup, and test out the $100 Smartboard being beamed on a pane of glass.