Those guys at Google are naughty sometimes. At this year's MacWorld the Google booth had a nifty display showing a hacked Wii Balance Board being used to 'surf' through Google Earth.

Earth Surfer came out of the brain of David Phillip Oster, a Google Earth iPhone engineer. It works pretty much how you would expect it to - you lean backwards, forwards, left and right on the Balance Board to control your movement through Google Earth in its 3D aspect.

The good news for coders is that Oster plans to make the code open source and will be putting it into the public domain as of next week. It will be going up over at the Google Mac Developer Playground.

You can see Earth Surfer in action below and you can get the techy version of how it works here.



^{Source: Google Lat Long Blog}