I’ve been toying with the idea of purchasing a Wacom Cintiq device. In our line of work hand drawing is important still and the amount of tracing (I mean digitizing) I do hasn’t decreased.

Prior to that I need to justify it to myself and my colleagues that a mouse and keyboard just isn’t going to cut it for much longer…
Here’s what you need:
- Wii remote (an old one will do without the sensor thingy)
- Smoothboard.net software + infrared pen, you can get a kit from here I would recommend a dual pen with button and pressure sensitive nib, that way you can use it on a hard and soft surface
- Wii battery cover with camera tripod fitting (you can make or buy one)
- Projector (we have an old one but I recommend something that’s bright short throw and high resolution)
- PC or laptop with Bluetooth!
Really the infrared pen is the difficult bit to get, you can make it yourself but I suggest you get it from people like this http://www.infraredpen.co.uk/index.php/ (not a product endorsement but that it is where I got my kit and it came pretty quick.
Basically it all worked for me. Follow the install instructions and it really is incredibly simple. One thing I would warn is that if you’re using the Wii remote at home you might find it wants to connect to the Wii rather than your laptop.
I’m using an old Wii remote, a Dell Vostro 3300 laptop (with windows 8 see here), getting the angle of the wii remote (it has an infrared camera in it) is crucial. Also it takes some getting used to drawing whilst keep your shadow out of the way.
Here is a picture of me, I’m not in a dark room, it’s the camera adjusting for the brightness of the projector.

Bottom line here: don’t discount cheap workarounds this setup works very well with ArcGIS, don’t make this stuff just buy it from someone who does. We’ll be taking this setup to a meeting with some people we’re working with in a couple of weeks. Instead of them drawing on a piece of paper and then digitizing it into the GIS we’re going to draw directly into the GIS.
Side note: this didn’t seem to work with CityEngine, It’ll try and figure it out and get back to you…
Love it, combine this with a Kinect and the ArcGIS SDK and maybe you could draw directly into the GIS, use CityEngine to render it and navigate with hand gestures, all in the same session!
Comments are closed.