We've all heard of exergaming, but what do you get when you mix a hacked Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner with a balance board? You get exercleaning. Housewives the world over rejoice. Now you can combine exercise and the pesky household chores into one time-saving activity, freeing you up for more daytime telly.

Seriously though, I don't really see any practical application for this particular techno-marriage but you've got to admire the ingenuity.

WiiFlash.org has just released the latest version of WiiFlash Server which now includes support for the Wii Balance Board. WiiFlash is similar to WiimoteLib which I've mentioned previously (see Wii Board Hacks) but in addition to providing a Bluetooth events server for communicating with the Wiimote and balance board, WiiFlash includes an ActionScript API.

And if you think WiiFlash is just 'for fun' think again. Below is a screenshot of a project developed by Fernando Flórez for Visa and the Beijing Olympics. WiiFlash Server also includes support for online applications so expect to see a lot more of this over the coming months.

In the runnup to the release of Wii Fit, there was loads of speculation on the Balance Board about possible games and potential applications. At the time, the idea of using the Wii Board with driving simulators to control breaking and accelerating seemed a bit out there but it was only a matter of time before somebody went and did it.

That somebody has turned out to be GlovePIE wizz, Mike Sylvester, who has written a script to use both the Wii Wheel and the Wii Balance Board with Need For Speed ProStreet. Check out his Wii Racing Xperiment - it makes for some interesting reading and he's also posted a video showing the script in action.

Anyone heard of Audiosurf? I have to admit that I'd never heard of it until I heard about BodySurf. Basically, Audiosurf is a PC game which "is a music-adapting puzzle racer where you use your own music to create your own experience. The shape, the speed, and the mood of each ride is determined by the song you choose. You earn points for clustering together blocks of the same color on the highway and compete with others on the internet for the high score on your favourite songs."

Up until now, the game was played using a mouse and keyboard but with the release of BodySurf, a GlovePIE script, you can now use your Wiimote and Balance Board to play the game. Kudos to the author, Evan Jones, for another clever use of the Wii Board.

Not content with surfing this world, those clever guys at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence are at it again, this time showing us how to use the Wii Balance Board to control World of Warcraft. I can't wait to see what they do next.

A bit of a techie post this but some good news is that the latest version of WiimoteLib has been released and it now includes support for the Wii Balance Board.

For those of you not familiar with WiimoteLib, it's basically a .Net library that allows you to use your Nintendo Wii Remote with any bluetooth enabled laptop or PC running Windows. Now some folk may wonder why on earth you'd actually want to do that. Well, just because you can, is one reason but there are actually some fun and innovative alternative uses for the Wiimote, and my current favourite is BlueTunes.

BlueTunes allows you to control music players (Windows Media Player, iTunes, Winamp to name a few) with your Wiimote by assigning player functions to various buttons or even using motion control e.g. moving the Wiimote left or right to skip tracks, similar to the shake control in the latest Sony Ericsson Walkman mobiles. So now, if you use your PC to stream music at home you can control it without getting off the couch - pretty cool.

A little while back I posted an entry about the two German researchers who used a Wii Balance Board to surf Google Earth. They had to write their own library for this but now that WiimoteLib supports the Wii Board it's only a matter of time before we start to see some really wacky uses for the board so watch this space.

Update: turns out there was a bug in the Wii Balance Board support for v1.5 but this has now been fixed in v1.5.1.

Examples of DIY balance board-like controllers have been doing the rounds online for some time, but this clip on German youtube has to be the first example of using an actual Wii Balance Board for non-Wii applications.

Techie readers will know that the Wii board communicates wirelessly with the Wii console via bluetooth which means that essentially, the board can communicate with any bluetooth enabled device. Now, after a beer and Bratwurst (one would imagine) fueled moment of inspiration, it seems that two boffins at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence have developed a C# application that allows the Wii balance board to control any PC-based application.

In principal it's quite simple. The application, on a bluetooth enabled laptop, receives signals from the four balance board sensors and converts these signals into events which can, for example, be mapped to particular key events like pressing the left, right, up and down arrows on a keyboard.

So far, the video shows them using the Wii board with Google Earth and Microsoft Virtual Earth as well as controlling the movements of a Second Life avatar but the possibilites are endless and not just for gaming and fun stuff. You could almost see this going mainstream - endless rows of cubicle workers frantically tapping balance boards under their desks as they shift our personal details from one department to the next.

Update: turns out I was wrong about this being the first example of a Wii Board hack. Check out this wiki stub from the end of April.