A couple of Google engineers have adapted the Wii Balance Board to surf the world in the Google Earth program.
Members of the Google Earth team took the opportunity to set up shop at MacWorld and display “Earth Surfer”, a mod for Google Earth allowing players to hop on the Wii Balance Board and travel the satellite-imaged world on a hovering milk truck.
Engineer David Phillip Oster explained the development, “To do this, I used the Google Earth Browser Plug-in with a Javascript API. The Wii Balance Board transmits the your movements to the Earth Surfer application using Bluetooth and allows you to maneuver a virtual milktruck by shifting your balance as if you were on a surfboard.”
Oster’s code will be open sourced under the Apache License, allowing the code to be used by anyone for commercial and non-commercial products. Earth Surfer and its code will be available next week on the Google Mac Developer Playground.
Source: Google Lat Long via VentureBeat
