Wednesday, January 02, 2013

KINECT PLUS PROJECTOR: On-The-Go Touch Interface

For all of its well-publicized stumbles, one of Microsoft's major victories is the Kinect, which turns the human body into a user interface. While it's been used primarily for Xbox video games, the Kinect technology package can do considerably more.

The OmniTouch project—a joint project between Microsoft Research and the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie-Mellon University—mounts a rig containing small pico projector and a Kinect-like 3D scanner on the user’s shoulder...
...The projector displays graphical images onto virtually any surface, while the 3D scanner’s depth-sensing capabilities transform the projection into an interactive, multi-touch-enabled input—and, thanks to some technical trickery, there’s no special calibration or training required.

You can imagine such a system projecting a full-sized QWERTY keyboard on a random flat service to allow faster keying on, say, a tablet computer.


Hat tip: BadBlue Tech News.

3 comments:

K-Bob said...

Well, except for the fact it makes you look like "Bert" in Mary Poppins, when he's in his "one man band" getup.

Put this baby in a flashy beret, like Che, and we can all wear it and look like revolutionaries at the same time.

Anonymous said...

Look like Kleenex stocks are going to go the roof....he is surely going to cry a river.......

Taqiyyotomist said...

It's going to get smaller, and probably chest-mounted like body armor.

Amazing technology, which progresses way too slow because we're spending all of our national treasury-drawn grant money on Midget Transgender Studies and 99 thousand other non-starter idiocies -- like the ever-expanding welfare state, like public-sector pensions and giveaways, like Pigford I, II, and III, like Solyndra, Ener1, BrightSource, A123, Fisker (all of whom for which Clinton's ENRON ("green energy company") was a trial balloon) and 20 or so other outright thefts of billions.

We could have had the Starship Enterprise by now. But the types of folks who created that show, that is, laughably-called "progressives", made progress impossible.

Theft and resort-hopping and hobnobbing and partying is WAY more important than realizing Roddenberry's vision.