Johnny Lee (computer scientist)

Johnny Chung Lee (born 1979) a computer engineer famous for his inventions related to the Wii Remote. He is involved with human-computer interaction.

• He earned a B.S. degree in computer engineering at the University of Virginia in 2001.[1]
• Lee completed his Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon University's Human-Computer Interaction Institute
• Sometime in 2008 Lee posted video demos and sample code at his website taking advantage of the high resolution (1024×768 Pixels) high frame-rate (100 Hz) IR camera built-in into the controller of the Wii video game console, the Wii Remote, for
  • finger tracking,
  • low-cost multipoint interactive whiteboards,
  • and head tracking for desktop VR displays.

This was the subject for his presentation at the prestigious TED conference in the same year, where he demonstrated several such applications. The WiimoteProject forum has become the discussion, support and sharing site for Lee's Wii Remote projects and other newer developments.

• he was named one of the world's top 35 innovators under 35 (TR35) in 2008.
• after that, Lee was hired by Microsoft to work on their Kinect project
• At some point he was hired at Google to work on their Project Tango.

He is a currently working at Google [2][3]

Lee's other projects include an interactive whiteboard, 3D head tracking, finger tracking, and a DIY telepresence robot.[4]

YouTube videos created for Lee's projects have received over 10 million views, with the Wii Remote head tracking project being the most highly rated video on YouTube of all time for more than a week in January 2008. He also demonstrated several of these applications at events such as TED, and has been featured on popular websites such as Slashdot, Gizmodo, hackedgadgets, Popular Science, Wired Blogs and Engadget several times. Various magazine, newspapers and television programs have featured interviews with Lee as well. Lee has also made invited appearances at events such as Maker Faire.

Electronic Arts had initially stated that Lee's Wii Remote head tracking technology would appear as an Easter egg in the game Boom Blox,[5] but later announced that the feature had been removed.[6]

While Lee was a core member of Microsoft's Kinect development team, he approached Adafruit with the idea of a driver development contest and personally financed it.[7]