yeah, that’s what I wanna know. is it some type of camera that has to be calibrated to each persons hand or what?

This looks very impressive. Some details on software and hardware (Hitachi projector I guess..) would be nice.

no idea how *they* are doing it, but you could do it by vibration sensing like the 3M Dispersive Signal Technology system:
http://solutions.3m.co.uk/wps/portal/3M/en_GB/TouchScreens/Home/ProdInfo/ScreenTech/DST/

I’ll take 2…

But seriously… how can we get something like this?

Ditto for the question above – some info on how “pointing” is differentiated from “gesturing” would be awful nice. I can think of several ways to do it, but I’m interested in how he specifically did it.

I can foresee some “gorilla arms” from this (your arm floats over the surface of the illustration rather than touching it) but hell – I’ll take 2!

Some of these interactive augmented displays are pretty cool, but I tend to question their practicality though. I mean, I would like to do more than shuffling 2D bitmaps around.

It should work like this:

That is a stanford lecture from 2006 by a guy at microsoft who eventually made their “Surface” tables. It’s really interesting stuff. I had a webcam configured so that it could tell when you were touching a wall, in an effort to make a really cool projector system for the home, but i got lazy and never finished. Did get it to detect when and where you were touching a wall though!
-Taylor

Sounds like: Booker T & The MGS – Green Onions

that is just too fúckíng awesome.

The projector is a 2000ANSI lumen projector, on such a small distance the brightness is enormous. And it helps that the woodgrain surface is lightwood coloured. On very dark coloured tables a sheet of paper or something is needed to make the projection brighter.

The software is capable of loading up 3d objects, but since the laptop powering it did not have any sufficient power to power 3d in flash (yup it was done in flash) it was omitted in the footage,
It is possible to draw annotations on the images in the prototype application with your finger. However I intended the use of wireless pens to transfer accurate notes and drawings – budget and time-wise this was not available for me at the time.
Furthermore deadline for the graduation date was too close to refine this more.

If you don’t touch the surface, the camera system will not detect your hand, since nothing reflects the laser light. Because of occlusion in the camera system, putting your elbow on the table does not matter much.

If you flip the suitcase, and put it against the wall, you have a wall projection, which is also touch enabled -tried it, but a normal white wall is much more icky to touch than the smooth meeting tables.