By LESLIE BERLIN

In December, Johnny Chung Lee posted a video on YouTube that became an Internet sensation.
The five-minute video showed how, in a few easy steps, the Nintendo Wii remote controller - or “Wiimote” - could transform a normal video screen into a virtual reality display, with graphics that seemed to pop through the screen and into the living room. So far, the video has been seen more than six million times.
That video, together with others that Mr. Lee, now 28, posted on YouTube, have drawn people to the innovator as well as his innovations. Video game companies have contacted him and, in September, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Technology Review named him as one of its top innovators under age 35.
When he completed his doctoral degree this year at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute of Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania, he received “lots of offers from all the big places,” according to Paul Dietz, who persuaded him to join Microsoft’s entertainment and devices division.
“When we told Bill Gates we were trying to recruit Johnny, he already knew about his work and was anxious to bring him to Microsoft,” adds Mr. Dietz, a research and development program manager.
Contrast this with what might have followed from other options Mr. Lee considered for communicating his ideas. He might have published a paper that only a few dozen specialists would have read. A talk at a conference would have brought a slightly larger audience. In either case, it would have taken months for his ideas to reach others.
Small wonder, then, that he credits posting to YouTube as an essential part of his success as an inventor. “Sharing an idea the right way is just as important as doing the work itself,” he says. “If you create something but nobody knows, it’s as if it never happened.”
Before posting his own ideas, Mr. Lee watched other people’s videos about the Wiimote. An online community of electronics hobbyists share ideas in video form, not only on YouTube but also at sites like instructables. com and makezine. com. This kind of collaboration lets the hobbyists “take advantage of economies of scale of innovation,” Mr. Lee says.
In late 2002 he started a small company to build and sell another invention, designed to help filmmakers minimize camera- shaking. He sells this “Poor Man’s Steadycam” for $39.95 online - commercial versions start at five times that price - though he also encourages people to download free instructions from his Web site and to build the device themselves for $14 in parts.
The steadycam company is his only foray into business. His decision to share, rather than sell, most of his ideas is linked to his definition of success, which he measures in terms of impact, not dollars. This, he says, is a reason he chose to join Microsoft: the company’s enormous customer base represents “real potential to help other people.
Mr. Lee said he chose his personal projects based on what he called their “work-towow” ratio; by “wow” he means impact. “I want to get the biggest wow for the smallest amount of work,” he explained.
The wow ratio of the Wii mote projects was fantastic: each idea that has reached millions of people took only three to four days to conceive, build, film and post.
Mr. Lee encourages innovators to ask themselves, “Would providing 80 percent of the capability at 1 percent of the cost be valuable to someone?” If the answer is yes, he says, pay attention. Trading relatively little performance for substantial cost savings can generate what he calls “surprising and often powerful result both scientifically and socially.”