A Scalable Multi-User Laser Input System

Projection technology has made wall -size displays a common component of modern meeting rooms. However, input technologies that comfortably allow multiple people to share and interact with the displayed data have seen relatively littl e progress. We introduce a system architecture that allows any number of users to interact simultaneously with a large display surface. In this system, each user utili zes a laser pointer as a pen or pointing device. Using computer vision techniques and Kalman filtering, the system determines the beginning, continuation, and end of all currently active pointer strokes, where a stroke is the continuous path of a laser spot on the display surface from the appearance of the spot to its disappearance. The laser spot position, velocity, and acceleration associated with each currently active stroke is available for use by application programs. This system scales well with display size, display resolution, and number of users.

[1]  Greg Welch,et al.  The office of the future: a unified approach to image-based modeling and spatially immersive displays , 1998, SIGGRAPH.

[2]  Allison Druin,et al.  Single display groupware: a model for co-present collaboration , 1999, CHI '99.

[3]  Y. Bar-Shalom.  Tracking and data association , 1988 .

[4]  David Goldberg,et al.  Touch-typing with a stylus , 1993, INTERCHI.

[5]  Kori Inkpen Quinn,et al.  The Effect of Turn-Taking Protocols on Children's Learning in Mouse-Driven Collaborative Environments , 1997, Graphics Interface.

[6]  Pat Hanrahan,et al.  A distributed graphics system for large tiled displays , 1999, Proceedings Visualization '99 (Cat. No.99CB37067).

[7]  Hiroshi Ishii,et al.  ClearBoard: a seamless medium for shared drawing and conversation with eye contact , 1992, CHI.

[8]  Richard A. Brown,et al.  Introduction to random signals and applied kalman filtering (3rd ed , 2012 .

[9]  Jun Rekimoto,et al.  A multiple device approach for supporting whiteboard-based interactions , 1998, CHI.

[10]  Janne Heikkilä,et al.  A four-step camera calibration procedure with implicit image correction , 1997, Proceedings of IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition.

[11]  Steven L. Rohall,et al.  The VIEP system: interacting with collaborative multimedia , 1996, UIST '96.

[12]  Thomas A. Funkhouser,et al.  Load balancing for multi-projector rendering systems , 1999, Workshop on Graphics Hardware.

[13]  Steve Freeman,et al.  MMM: a user interface architecture for shared editors on a single screen , 1991, UIST '91.

[14]  Joseph A. Paradiso,et al.  Tracking hands above large interactive surfaces with a low-cost scanning laser rangefinder , 1998, CHI Conference Summary.

[15]  William Buxton,et al.  A taxonomy of see-through tools , 1994, CHI '94.

[16]  John C. Tang,et al.  Liveboard: a large interactive display supporting group meetings, presentations, and remote collaboration , 1992, CHI.

[17]  Steven L. Tanimoto,et al.  Support for cooperatively controlled objects in multimedia applications , 1997, CHI Extended Abstracts.

[18]  Thomas P. Moran,et al.  Tivoli: an electronic whiteboard for informal workgroup meetings , 1993, INTERCHI.

[19]  Jun Rekimoto,et al.  HoloWall: designing a finger, hand, body, and object sensitive wall , 1997, UIST '97.