Karl D.D. Willis, Ivan Poupyrev, Scott E. Hudson and Moshe Mahler have just released details of their latest project at Disney Research, a novel interactive system that allows multiple people to play and work together using a custom handheld device. The device combines handheld projector, IR camera and a ranging sensor. The project is a step forward from MotionBeam, first project by members of the team developed with Disney and Computational Design Lab at Carnegie Mellon University.
The system is immediate and simple: users simply project onto a surface and their projection becomes aware and responsive to other projections nearby. Interaction can range from projector-based games, such as boxing with projected characters, to everyday tasks such as exchanging contact information by ‘dragging and dropping’ onto another user’s projection.
The system consists of a hybrid mobile projector that outputs both visible and invisible projections at the same time. The invisible projection contains tracking data that can be recognised by the device camera, allowing accurate location tracking of multiple projections and lightweight communication between devices. The games range from boxing match to task management and file exchange. See video for details.
The current setup runs two separate handheld devices on a single Apple MacBook Pro (2.89 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo) at a frame rate of ~45fps. Camera imagery is processed at 640×480 pixels and graphics are outputted at 800×600 pixels before being downscaled to the 480×320 resolution supported by the DLP projection engine. The underlying ARToolKitPlus tracking library is designed for use with mobile devices. The team believes SideBySide will run sufficiently on a current generation mobile device and within 2-4 years and will match the performance of their current implementation.
You can download the full project paper here : PDF, 2.2MB
The SideBySide project is being developed at Disney Research Pittsburgh and the Computational Design Lab / DevLab, Carnegie Mellon University by Karl D.D. Willis, Ivan Poupyrev, Scott Hudson, and Moshe Mahler.
