Augmented Reality on Your Desk—All You Need Is a Lightbulb Socket
Do you have a lamp with a standard-size lightbulb socket? If so, you’ve already got one piece of the required gear for turning your desk—or fridge, wall, or pretty much any other surface—into an augmented-reality display that you can interact with much as you do with the screen of a smartphone.
That’s the premise behind a project from researchers in the Future Interfaces Group at Carnegie Mellon University. Called Desktopography, it uses a small projector, a depth sensor, and a computer to project images onto surfaces; the projections can move around to stay out of the way of objects that are also on the surface. It screws into a lightbulb socket, and the latest prototype uses the lamp for power, says Robert Xiao, a graduate student who leads the project.
Desktopography can project things like a calculator or map onto a desk, and then you can interact with it or move it around by using multiple fingers. If you place an object—say, a cup—on the area where one of the images is projected, software helps it quickly move to an open spot. The projections can be linked to physical objects, too, so if you move a book across a table, a calendar projected on it can travel along.
technologyreview.com
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