You've probably already seen the video below. 2.6 million people already have.

Obviously, the material covered is amazing and it's an ingenious hack - the fact that the rig consisted of some cheap goggles, LED lights, and a $40 kid's toy hooked up to a PC made it even more impressive.

NetQoS is working on our own user-interface initiatives. Network management software can be hard to grasp - it's a complicated subject - and so the user interface for our products have to be designed with human interaction and ease-of-use in mind. Network engineering is hard, we don't want to make it harder. This is why we've spent a great deal of time working on the interface of NetQoS Performance Center - and we've been pushing the boundaries of network monitoring UI design with our Netcosm project in the NetQoS Performance Labs.

This reminded us that it was probably a good idea to check in with Dr. Jon Schull, a professor at Rochester Institute of Technology who specializes in human-computer interaction and asked him what he thought about the video. Dr. Schull had previously helped NetQoS get the "Netcosm Immersion Experience" up and running at Cisco Networkers in 2007, and we wanted to get his input on this development.

"My main thought was: 'Johnny Lee has done it again,'" said Schull. "If you look at his Web site, you'll see that he's done half a dozen really interesting hacks involving the Wii and another half a dozen involving other things. He's a very interesting and creative guy. This particular one is… is just cool!"

"I don't know how likely it is for us to see this in [gaming] practice, just because I think increasingly the Wii is a social gaming platform, and this is mostly a one-person interface. But, these are the early days and I can see that people are already thinking of ways to have this work for more than one person."

It seemed impressive in an industrial age of multi-person programming teams and high-tech equipment costs, that this was all done with relatively cheap consumer-level equipment.

"There's this other movement that's going on - and this work is exemplary of it," explained Schull. "If you look at Make: Magazine and Instructables and a Web site called 'Hack-a-day' you'll see there's this whole emerging sub-culture of people who are… getting to interesting new results faster by disassembling and reconstructing things from consumer products than by trying to develop these new technologies from scratch."

"I guarantee you there are people who are making those systems right now - they're going to Home Depot, they're getting the goggles, they're getting the Infrared LEDs, and they're having some fun with it. A couple months later, someone's going to sell a kit, and a few months after that, someone will have found a distribution channel for a retail product… That $40 Wii remote contains an accelerometer, a Bluetooth transmitter, an infrared camera - there's an amazing amount of hardware in that $40 item. Eventually someone will put them together in a new device which is optimized for new uses."

Schull pointed out that these new uses are usually found and implemented within months, rather than decades.

"Within weeks, [of the Wii release] you had people figuring out how to hack the Wiimote to use with computers… There are already on the market designed for PCs which are clearly Wii knock-offs. It took less than a year for those commercial products to come out. I think you'll see things like this within six months because Johnny Lee's video has been traveling like crazy. Off the top of my head, it's usable in games, looking at 3D models of architectural sites, 3D models of medical anatomy. There are some major applications - and those latter two could be six-or-seven figure products."

"Another venture of this sort is the whole Multi-touch phenomenon. You've certainly seen the iPhone now, where you can use more than one finger, and you can rotate and drag and move images around by laying hands on them in a way that wasn't possible two years ago. Just two years ago, we saw another set of videos taking the world by storm by a guy named Jeff Han, who demonstrated all the things you could do with multi-touch interfaces. It was approximately a year before it was part of an Apple product."

Schull's work at Rochester University of Technology in Interface design has helped him to design a product like this himself - a large room called the "Collaboratorium" which consists of multiple projectors in a large, enclosed room with a camera that can be controlled remotely. We asked him what was more difficult for innovators - coding the software and hacking the hardware, or just coming up with the vision for new and innovative ways to interact with computers.

"The funny thing is, I think the hardware and software problems are pretty straightforward right now. The social - and market issues are really the tough ones… We haven't seen a room-sized head-tracking stereoscopic multi-touch environment for cheap. Not because you couldn't put one together for cheap, but because it'll be another 6 to 12 months before they get integrated, and then you have to deal with the packaging. No, the real challenge is going to come from defining some come of human interface device standard which will let these things work by themselves or in combination without having to rewrite software for each configuration."

Considering that we at NetQoS have been experimenting with new and interesting user interfaces for network monitoring software, we'll keep an eye - and two infrared light beams - on this technology.

Do you see a use for head-tracking 3D software in your enterprise? Tell us about it by leaving a comment!