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The Nintendo Wii remote (or "Wiimote" for short) first made waves with consumers because of its motion-sensitive gameplay, but other more technically minded individuals have found a lot more value by tinkering with the impressive controller.

A loose-knit community of developers and hackers have created dozens of different methods and contraptions that use the Wiimote's infrared camera sensor. Various websites have recently published lists of hacks for the Wii, several of which are for the Wiimote alone. Some of those listed explain how to use a Wiimote with an Xbox 360, opening electric door locks and even turning the Wiimote into a phone.

But the popularity of these Wiimote hacks gained the most traction on YouTube, where crafty developers and curious consumers showed off their best efforts. Some notable examples include using the Wiimote to control a Windows, Mac or Linux laptop, controlling a small robot's movements and using two Wiimotes to play air drums.

Johnny Lee was among those who attracted a lot of attention by posting his findings in several how-to videos on YouTube. Currently studying in the Human Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, Lee admits that his dabbling with the Wiimote was purely a personal interest.

Even so, he was invited to showcase his Wiimote hacks at the 2008 Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) 2008 conference held in Long Beach, CA in February. His keynote was titled, " Creating tech marvels out of a $40 Wii remote," and he received a rousing applause after demonstrating how he was able to turn a standard projection whiteboard into an interactive touchscreen.

"The Wiimote is basically a camera that can see infrared dots, so all you need to do is create something that emits infrared light," says Lee in an interview. "Common household objects that do that are a remote control, a candle or lighter, for example. If you use my software with one of those items, you can move the cursor on-screen."

But rather than use a candle, Lee bought an LED emitter, like those used in remote controllers, along with a switch and a AA battery. He used the casing of a marker pen to house the battery and then wired up the switch to the LED. "For just a few dollars, I had a nice little form factor with a button on it so that when I push it, the LED turns on and the camera can see the dot," he says.

He connected the remote to a Windows laptop running his software through a Bluetooth connection. From there, Lee says the Wiimote's camera did a lot of the heavy lifting through its built-in motion tracking and computer vision algorithms.

Hack-a-Wii is a website that focuses entirely on hacks for the console and its peripherals. It allows users to post their contraptions on video so that others can post comments.

One particular case fuses Nintendo's current technology with a blast from the past. Nintendo's Duck Hunt made the zapper gun famous, itself an infrared device, and one modder managed to connect it to a Wiimote. Originally, the 80's-era gun had a power wire that connected it to the Nintendo console. The modder removed that wire and replaced it with his own, so that he could connect the gun's LED emitter directly to the Wiimote's infrared pointer.

The end result allowed him to play current first-person shooter games for the Wii by using the old gun connected to a Wiimote, which he claims gives him better precision and movement than Nintendo's Wii Zapper peripheral.

There are plenty of other examples that make use of the infrared side, but Lee says the other expansion port that typically connects the Wiimote to standard peripherals like the nunchuk or the Guitar Hero guitars creates other opportunities.

Because the expansion port's protocols are "very open", it allows you to push arbitrary data in and off the controller so that you can control arbitrary devices. In other words, you can control almost any device so long as you can make the right connection between the port and device.

"To work with the expansion port generally requires a little bit of wiring, mostly because it's a proprietary connector," Lee explains. "You then have to hook up electronics to it that will 'talk' over a wired communication protocol. That tends to require a bit more electronics knowledge, but talking to the Wiimote itself using the built-in sensors is actually pretty simple."

One of his favourite examples was from another modder who mounted a Wiimote on top of a remote-controlled car with a fan attached to it. The Wiimote's camera would look for an infrared dot emitting light, in this case a candle. Once the camera saw the light, the modder used communication over the expansion port to drive the car up to the candle to blow it out with the fan.

Still another case involved a modder having a small robot try to mimic his movements while playing the boxing game in Wii Sports.

During his TED 2008 keynote, Lee said Electronic Arts was looking to include something similar to his head-tracking mod in an upcoming Wii puzzle game called Boom Blox. But after some consideration, Lee says the game developer backed out because it wanted to refine the technology before including it as a last-minute add-on in a game.

"If game developers want to make a game incorporating this feature as a core mechanic, then they have to build a whole game around it, which can be a very long development cycle," he says.

To do so "requires only 50 to 100 lines of code" and it would be possible for someone who has access to a video game's source code to "get it working within a couple of hours." But the results could vary because the developers never actually coded the games that way, he warns.

Despite his notoriety, Lee says Nintendo has never contacted him about any of his findings. Nintendo Canada also declined to comment on this story.

Nevertheless, Lee offers all the software for his hacks free on his website along with tutorials and explanations.