SlashGear

Nintendo’s Wii Fit board is great, but what if you expect more from a peripheral than to be told you’re overweight and should do more yoga?  Two researchers from DFKI (the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence) decided to see just what else you could control by wriggling your body Michael Jackson glued to the spot; with some custom software and a standard Bluetooth-enabled laptop, they came up with a proof-of-concept way to navigate World of Warcraft 3 and Google Earth.

Video demo of the hacked Wii Fit board in action after the cut

Right now it’s solely controlled by your leaning movements on the board; there’s no integration with any sort of handheld controller.  The obvious addition would be a Wiimote-based gun or sword, ducking and diving as you try desperately to sway around any number of FPS nasties.

Hopefully the next phase of the research will include coupling a secondary control into the gameplay; it shouldn’t be too difficult, though I’m no programmer.  The great thing is that it could be a far cheaper introduction to whole-body interfaces than traditional virtual reality hardware.

[via technabob]