Projector-Based Location Discovery and Tracking

While a number of projects within the computer graphics, computer vision, and human-computer interaction community have explored the powerful ability for projected light to create illusions that can reshape our perception and interaction with surfaces in the environment, very few of these systems have had success in terms of commercial and consumer adoption. Often these systems require expert knowledge to perform system setup and calibration between the projected images and the physical surfaces to make these illusions effective. In this thesis work, I present a technique for inherently adding object location discovery and tracking capabilities to commercial projectors. This is accomplished by introducing light sensors into the projection area and then spatially encoding the image area using a series of structured light patterns. This delivers a unique pattern of light to every pixel in the projector’s screen space directly encoding the location data using the projector itself. I present three evolutionary prototype systems of increasing capability and demonstrate the applications enabled and simplified during each stage of development. By unifying the image projection and location tracking technology into a single device I can greatly simplify the implementation of previous systems and enable interaction capabilities which are difficult or impossible using alternative approaches.