So I went up to SIGGRAPH today to meet up with some of the NUIGroup guys. I was mainly interested in seeing their new tech demos, but I didn't see all that much. There were a few exhibits that caught my attention.
IncreTable is a multi-touch table designed to work with objects on the surface of the table. While it is a multi-touch table, they did not demo any of that technology. They had two demos and the multi-touch demo was not accepted. Instead, they had a ZCam mounted above the table that measured depth to alter terrain in a virtual game world.
The ZCam mounted above the table with a projector alongside
The virtual 3D world and the physical objects placed on the table
They had a second application that used the same setup. What was really interesting was that they explored the reverse approach as well, namely manipulating physical objects with virtual ones. They had a virtual domino setup that when triggered would actually knock over real dominoes placed on the table using a cylindrical bluetooth actuator identified with fiducial markers on the top of it.
The virtual dominoes are on the left and the knocked-over physical dominoes are on the right.
Also, something very interesting was that they were using Anoto pens to control their program. They seem to have found a surface that you can print the Anoto dot patterns onto and which seems to eliminate the need for the silicone compliant surface. I was unable to find out what the material of the surface was because they weren't ready to disclose that information just yet. It seems they spent a year researching it.
Butterfly Haptics was a pretty interesting exhibit. They use magnetic levitation to create joystick input devices that you can use to control a 3D world of blocks. I was really amazed at how I felt like I was actually touching objects of different weights. When I stacked blocks on each other, they actually felt heavier to lift. Apparently I was messing up the magnetic fields somehow because the woman running the demo had to reset it a number of times and finally had to ask me to step back before she could reset it.
ForceTile reminded me a lot of the SLAP widgets we are looking to develop. However, they used a second sensor to measure force on a tile by way the tile deformed when pressure was being applied to it.
The tiles were illuminated with the projector and used to represent control buttons for their demo application.
This demo did not have too much information, but the group had developed a 3D world that the manipulated with the widgets on the multitouch surface (on the right). The widgets were labeled with fiducial markers to identify them to the camera system.
This project seems very relevant to our work. It's the same work that Seth sent out to us a while back (here), but I hadn't seen their results. The group has implemented a pulsed LED array that grabs a frame from the camera when the array is off and another one when the pulse is high. When these two images are subtracted, you are left with an image only containing foreground objects illuminated by the FTIR. Apparently it seems to work very well and the two images on the right illustrate the circuit used to drive the system. It would be interesting for us to try.
The remainder of the pictures are located in my flickr album at:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/21704518@N00/sets/72157606701371183/
