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impactTV impactTV
is easy. If you want to watch basketball, you throw a basketball at
the screen and it switches to the basketball game. If you want to watch
baseball, you throw a baseball. If you want the kids channel, you throw
a teddy bear. A very intuitive interface, as demonstrated by a 5 year
old kid, who did not need any instructions, but kept on throwing all
sort of objects at it. In scientific terms, ImpactTV is a system where physical objects contain digital information, without actually holding any data. It is a unique interface to the old problem of the remote control. The challenge was to find a way recognizing the different objects. We did not want to put a battery in a basketball (not a very "natural" interface), so decided to use vision detection. A camera pointing at the screen is triggered by a microphone that picks up the sound when an object is thrown at the screen. It then looks at the screen and tries to identify the object by its colour and size. The problem we encountered was that because you might have watched basketball, and thrown a baseball, the camera might also pick up the basketball that was shown on screen. So we came up with a unique way of polarizing the light coming out of the projector, and making it invisible for the camera. The funny part was that we showed a red bra to switch to the adult channel (I had to buy the bra for research purposes), but were then forbidden by MIT to show such content. Of course you can watch it in the video:
You need a fast DSL connection for streaming, otherwise, you can download the video in VHS quality (320x240, 25fps, 300kbps, CBR). The paper describing the project in detail is here. |
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