Spatial Control of Interactive Surfaces in an Augmented Environment

New display technologies will enable designers to use every surface as a support for interaction with information technology. In this article, we describe techniques and tools for enabling efficient man-machine interaction in computer augmented multi-surface environments. We focus on explicit interaction, in which the user decides when and where to interact with the system. We present three interaction techniques using simple actuators: fingers, a laser pointer, and a rectangular piece of cardboard. We describe a graphical control interface constructed from an automatically generated and maintained environment model. We implement both the automatic model acquisition and the interaction techniques using a Steerable Camera-Projector (SCP) system.