Crystal balls are generally considered as media to perform divination or fortune-telling. These imaginations are mainly from some fantasy films and fiction, in which an augur can see into the past, the present, or the future through a crystal ball. With the distinct impressions, crystal ball has revealed itself as a perfect interface for the users to access and to manipulate visual media in an intuitive, imaginative and playful manner. We developed an interactive visual display system named Magic Crystal Ball (MaC Ball). MaC Ball is a spherical display system, which allows the users to see a virtual object/scene appearing inside a transparent sphere, and to manipulate the displayed content with barehanded interactions. Interacting with MaC Ball makes the users feeling acting with magic power. With MaC Ball, user can manipulate the display with touch and hover interactions. For instance, the user waves hands above the ball, causing clouds blowing from bottom of the ball, or slides fingers on the ball to rotate the displayed object. In addition, the user can press single finger to select an object or to issue a button. MaC Ball takes advantages on the impressions of crystal balls, allowing the users acting with visual media following their imaginations. For applications, MaC Ball has high potential to be used for advertising and demonstration in museums, product launches, and other venues.
In this paper, we developed a fingertip finding algorithm working with a regular diffuser. The proposed algorithm works on images captured by infra-red cameras, settled on one side of the diffuser, observing human gestures taken place on the other side. With diffusion characteristics of the diffuser, we can separate finger-touch from palm-hover events when the user interacts with the diffuser. This paper contributes on: Firstly, the technique works with a regular diffuser, infra-red camera coupled with an infra-red illuminator, which is easy to deploy and cost effective. Secondly, the proposed algorithm is designed to be robust for casually illuminated surface. Lastly, with diffusion characteristics of the diffuser, we can detect finger-touch and palm-hover events, which is useful for natural user interface design. We have deployed the algorithm on a rear-projection multi-resolution tabletop, called I-M-Top. A video retrieval application using the two events on design of UIs is implemented to show its intuitiveness on the tabletop system.
Personal tabletops are the workspaces we regularly work with in the daily life. From home to office, we switch among tables to proceed with different types of works, such as browsing, reading, annotating and writing of documents. For complex works, we perform analysis or classification of documents on the tabletop. With the help of a digital surface attached on and computations inside a table, we are able to facilitate these daily works, for example, to enlarge a portion of the document, to annotate a digit memo or to share documents via network.In this demonstration, we will present "i-m-Top", a rear-projection interactive multi-resolution tabletop display system (see Figure 1). This table allows the user to perform regular and long-term works such as reading and writing of documents. The design of the tabletop system well meets the following concerns: (1) provide movable high-resolution perception of the tabletop, (2) avoid the shadowing effect by rear projection, (3) reserve space for the user to place their legs with comfort and (4) allow interactions on the tabletop by bare hands and a pen. Figure 1. The "i-m-Top", a rear-projection interactive multi-resolution tabletop displayThe "i-m-Top" consists of two projectors, the foveal and peripheral projectors. The foveal projector projects highresolution images on the foveal region of the tabletop, which is a small region the user puts his gaze to, while the peripheral projector projects images on the peripheral region, which covers the whole tabletop. The foveal projector is realized with a steerable mirror to allow the high-resolution foveal region to move and follow the user's gaze. We have also developed a fingertip detection and recognition module, with which the users can interact with the tabletop by their bare hands.To our best knowledge, this is the first multi-resolution rear-projection tabletop working with a steerable foveal projector, allowing the users to move foveal region to display the details. Figure 2 shows a map navigation application implemented on the tabletop system. Figure 2. A map navigation application implemented on the "i-m-Top".
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