If you’ve followed any of my Virtual Earth 3D projects, you know that the managed API has been undocumented and unsupported for a while.  All the work that has been done so far has been possible due to a few VE3D team members posting information on their blogs and through reverse engineering using tools like Reflector.

Well, half of the problem has been solved:  The VE3D team has now released beta documentation for the VE3D GlobeControl !  As their blog post states, it’s still beta and not officially supported, but it’s definitely a great a start.

Now to see what assumptions I made in my projects that are incorrect…

I previously talked about my WiiEarthVR project shown at PDC project, and now I have posted the article for the application up at the Coding4Fun site.  Full source code is available.  You’ll need some hardware to make this go, namely a Wiimote, Nunchuk, Wii Fit Balance Board and a pair of Vuzix VR920 glasses, but the hardware can be toggled on or off depending on your own setup.  The VR920 glasses are pretty cool in that they also work with a variety of FPS games on your PC with a custom driver they include.

The article will, among other things, teach you how to use Virtual Earth 3D from a managed host (i.e. a WinForms app, not a web page), how to talk to the Wiimote, Nunchuk and Wii Fit Balance Board, how to retrieve the head tracking data from the VR920 glasses from .NET, and how to draw stereoscopic 3D images to the VR920 glasses from .NET.  Quite a bit packed in there…

Anyway, have a read and, as always, questions and comments are welcome.

Well, PDC2008 is over.  I had a lot of fun, met a ton of interesting and fun people, and learned about a lot of exciting new technologies.  I hope to make it back out there next year.

Our PDC2008 session video has been posted up at Channel 9 along with the PowerPoint slide deck.  In this session you will learn about four of our current projects:  WiiEarthVR by myself, InnerTube by Dan Fernandez, TwitterVote by Clint Rutkas and BabySmash by Scott Hanselman.

If you’d like to check out the video, you can watch it “live” or download the deck and video in various formats with the following links:

• Channel 9 session page with video and slides
• WMV-HD
• WMV (not HD)
• Zune
• PowerPoint deck

Source code for all projects will be available soon and I’ll provide an update when it’s available.  WiiEarthVR will also have its own Coding4Fun article within a week or two.  InnerTube and TwitterVote are also featured in depth in our new book, “Coding4Fun: 10 …

Update 1/20/09: Here’s a vid from Channel9 showing the WiiEarthVR project:

Time to talk a little bit about my PDC demo…

About a year ago, I wrote an application to control Virtual Earth 3D with the Wiimote named WiiEarth and a corresponding Coding4Fun articleon how it was done.  Since that time VE3D has been updated several times and code changes have broken my application.  Since their API is undocumented and unsupported, it was bound to happen.

For PDC this year, I decided to write a new version of WiiEarth, now named WiiEarthVR, using the Wiimote and some additional hardware, namely the Wii Fit Balance Board and a pair of Vuzix VR920 glasses.  Using the Balance Board, the user can shift their center of gravity (i.e. lean) and control the VE3D environment as if they were on a hovering glider.

The VR920 glasses contain sensors to allow head tracking in 3 degrees of freedom.  A very simple API provides a way to determine the yaw, pitch …

Long time no blog.

My latest article is up at Coding4Fun.  This time I created a Wiimote interface for Virtual Earth 3D.  You can now drive around Virtual Earth like you're playing a first-person shooter on the Wii.  I think it's fun.  Hopefully you will too.  Here is a video of the demo in motion:

As always, full source code provided.  Give it a try and let me know what you think!

Additionally, I'll have a new version of my Wiimote library up in the next day or three.  Check back for more details...