Blog Post #13- Combining multiple depth cameras and projectors for interactions on, above and between surfaces

Reference

Authors:
Andrew D. Wilson     Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA, USA
Hrvoje Benko     Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA, USA


Published In:
UIST '10 Proceedings of the 23nd annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology

Summary

This paper is another of the technical possibilities type of article.  Instead of creating a hypothesis and setting out to test it, they are testing whether a particular type of technology is reasonable to construct and use.  For this particular paper the authors are testing a prototype they call, "LightSpace."  LightSpace is an interactive room powered by depth cameras.  These cameras are able to project onto any surface at a very high rate.  Thus allowing such interactions as: a projection of an image onto a user's hand as he walks or any flat surface in the room can be used as a projection board.  The system itself handles all projecting and combines the entire worldspace into one reference grid so developers do not have to worry with implementation details such as which camera is projecting what.  The idea of projecting onto the human body in this paper is called, "Simulated Surfaces."  With this, ListSpace keeps a vague mesh of the human bodies within the room, and much like the Microsoft Kinetic, tracks this mesh and allows for easy projection like a menu unto the user's hand or a graphic that the user wants to move from surface to surface. 

Overall, the paper was primarily to showcase the various methods of implementation the authors used in constructing their LightSpace room.  They also showed how one can project a 3D imagine unto a 2D surface which can then be analyzed by standard image processing techniques.


Discussion

I think the authors accomplished what they set out to do at the beginning of this book.  They wanted to outline their methodology of creating LightSpace and I feel like they did a good job of explaining the various implementation details.  Moving on, LightSpace is a very interesting piece of technology.  Frankly, many people would be interested in this because of their perceptions of the future.  Whether it is from books or movies, many people envision computers as an interactive unit like the one portrayed in this paper. An interesting point made by the authors is that it would be completely feasible to emulate the same functionality of a Microsoft Surface onto any flat surface.  What would be even more interesting and probably useful would be to allow interaction between the program behind the projectors AND a Microsoft Surface.  Since the Surface has such a high resolution compared to the projectors, users might be more comfortable exploring the interactions between the Surface and another Surface or just a board mounted on the wall like in the paper.