Johnny Chung Lee, the human-computer interaction designer behind some of the most innovative Wii hacks that have surfaced to date, has recently been working as part of Microsoft’s Kinect team. Today, that changed. Here’s part of a notice from Lee’s personal blog:
I have some big news to announce on a personal front: Very recently, I have left Microsoft to join a special projects team at Google.
Lee’s list of Wii hacks reads like a geek’s wet dream. His finger tracking demos showed off how you could start working with Minority Report style input methods using a $40 peripheral and some ingenuity. The interactive whiteboard demos were practical and useful to many users; they have also spun off several child projects from other developers.
But my favorite, the head tracking demo, shows how a 2D screen can trick your eye into seeing a 3D scene. It effectively turns your screen into a virtual window into another world. I can’t help but think, “this is how 3D games should be.” Check out the video below, it gets good about 2 minutes and 30 seconds in, where the 3D-like effect is demonstrated.
After Lee put his mark on the tech world with his Wii demos, he joined Microsoft’s Kinect team to work on motion tracking algorithms. In his post he goes on to say that he looks forward to “seeing how [Kinect] will evolve over the next few years and I absolutely wish the Xbox team the best of luck.” Considering how fast a community of Kinect hackers popped up, following in Lee’s footsteps, my hunch is that Kinect evolution is inevitable and motion tracking has a bright future.
So, what exactly is Lee going to be working on at Google? His official title is “Rapid Evaluator”. Unfortunately, that doesn’t explain much. One thing should be certain—good things are in store for Google products. I’m hoping that includes Android. Time will tell!
Now that you’ve seen what Johnny Chung Lee is capable of, do you have any guesses about what he’ll be working on at Google? Leave your comments below!
