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BurningWell

Micro-controller based sensor localization and tracking using projected light patterns.

Introduction: Displaying an image on an arbitrary surface requires that you know where the surface is located within the projection area. Other methods including manual calibration and camera based calibration are either time consuming, labor intensive, or error prone. We augment the display surface with an electronic light sensor which can determine its own position and report back to the projector via radio.
Additionally, our system can track the sensor as it moves in real time using a small tracking pattern, allowing mobile projection screens.

The hardware:

We used a Microchip rfPIC 12F675 with:

4Mhz RISC Processor
1024 program words (we used 858 )
64 bytes of RAM (we used 50)
Integrated Analog-to-Digital converter
UHF ASK 10dBm radio transmitter.

A hardware sensor which determines its physical location with respect to a projected pattern.

Download BurningWell The Movie
(6.1MB MPEG4 [divx] AVI)Divex.com has codecs and players available for MS Windows & Macintosh systems.

Radio receiver to computer interface circuit.

Tracking the sensor

After the initial localization stage, a hexagonal tracking pattern is used to track the sensor. When the sensor is not moving, the tracking pattern can be shrunk to cover only the sensor itself.

Tracking a display surface

	After localizing the sensor, a hexagonal tracking pattern is used to continue sending location data to the sensor while freeing up most of the projection area for display purposes. The intersection of the green and red lines indicate the current location of the sensor, and are visible for illustrative purposes only.
	A simple display screen with one sensor, allowing two dimensions of motion. Placing sensors on the other corners of the surface would allow the projector to track the quadrangle where the display should appear, and warp the image appropriately as the display is moved arbitrarily in 3-space.

Download BurningWell The Movie (6.1MB MPEG4 [divx] AVI) or Just the Highlights (1.2MB MPEG4 [divx] AVI)
Divex.com has codecs and players available for MS Windows & Macintosh systems.

Contributions

Tracking of sensor while using remainder of the display for output.
Error detecting code indicates when the location is successfully determined.
Sensor able to operate independently of the pattern generator (self syncing to the projected pattern).

Source Code & Hardware Information

Click Here for a dump of my development directory! It's not really packaged up, but it's all there if you want it!

Mentor

Intel Research Pittsburgh: Rahul Sukthankar

Publications

Moveable Interactive Projected Displays Using Projector Based Tracking.
Johnny C. Lee, Scott E. Hudson, Jay W. Summet, Paul H. Dietz.
Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST), pages 63-72, Seattle, WA. October 23-26, 2005.

Tracking Locations of Moving Hand-held Displays Using Projected Light
Jay Summet and Rahul Sukthankar.
Pervasive 2005, Munich, Germany. May 8-13, 2005. Springer-Verlag LNCS No. 3468. Pages 37-46.

Related Work

Automatic Projector Calibration with Embedded Light Sensors
Johnny C. Lee, Paul H. Dietz, Dan Maynes-Aminzade, Ramesh Raskar and Scott Hudson.
Proceedings of UIST 2004.
RFIG Lamps: Interacting with a Self-describing World via Photosensing Wireless Tags and Projectors
Ramesh Raskar, Paul Beardsley, Jeroen van Baar, Yao Wang, Paul Dietz, Johnny Lee, Darren Leigh, Thomas Willwacher
Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 2004.

Jay's Homepage > > Research > > BurningWell