EarthSurfer - A Macintosh OS X application to use a Nintendo Wii Balance Board to travel over Google Earth in a milk truck .

Download EarthSurfer

Download EarthSurfer

Compatibility

I've tested this version on Intel Macs with Bluetooth under OS X 10.8.

The original version was tested on Intel Macs with Bluetooth under OS X 10.4 and OS X 10.5. Earth Surfer is not yet compatible with PowerPC Macs (I'm still working on some Bluetooth issues.)

Earth Surfer Introduction

For Macworld, 2009 I decided to create a program that allows people to "surf" any region on the Earth's surface using a Nintendo Wii Balance Board and the Google Earth API. 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 EarthSurfer application using Bluetooth and allows you to maneuver a virtual milktruck by shifting your balance as if you were on a surfboard.

Check out this link for a video to see it in action.

While it's fun to use EarthSurfer, I really wrote it to inspire others to consider interesting device interactions. All my code is open source using the Apache License, so you can use the code in your own programs.

It is based on Thatcher Ulrich's terrific open source Javascript Monster Milktruck demo, and runs in a webpage. I wrapped it as a Macintosh application program so I could add Objective-C. Earth Surfer uses the Macintosh OS X Bluetooth framework to fetch the Bluetooth packets from the Wii Balance Board. I wrote methods to decode those packets into kilograms. I based my work on DarwiinRemote, open source decoders for the Wii Remote.

EarthSurferHowTo - * How to Install * How to Play

and for developers: * How to Build from source code * How to modify the source code, and * How you can help make this better.

Hardware Requirements: * an Apple Macintosh with a network connection and Bluetooth, running OS X 10.4 or newer. (Tested with OS X 10.8) * a Nintendo Wii Balance Board

You don't need the rest of the Wii for this. Just the Balance Board.

Note: Earth Surfer is more of a technology demo than a real, full-featured Macintosh application, so don't judge me harshly, just take the pieces and build something better.

Related Work

I’m not the only one to go beyond the keyboard and mouse to control Google Earth. Some related work.