A practical system for laser pointer interaction on large displays

ABSTRACT

Much work has been done on the development of laser pointers as interaction devices. Typically a camera captures images of a display surface and extracts a laser pointer dot location. This location is processed and used as a cursor position. While the current literature well explains such a system, we feel that some important practical concerns have gone unaddressed. We discuss the design of such a tracking system, focusing on key practical implementation details. In particular we present a robust and efficient dot detection algorithm that allows us to use our system under a variety lighting conditions, and allows us to reduce the amount of image parsing required to find a laser position by an order of magnitude.

REFERENCES

• 1: J. Davis and X. Chen. Lumipoint: Multi-user laser-based interaction on large tiled displays. Displays, 23(5), 2002.
• 2: Intel Corporation. Open source computer vision library reference manual, December 2000. http://sourceforge.net/projects/opencvlibrary/.
• 3: J. Oh and W. Stuerzlinger. Laser pointers as collaborative pointing devices. In Proceedings of Graphics Interface 2002, pages 141--149, 2002. http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/oh02laser.html.
• 4: Dan R. Olsen, Jr. , Travis Nielsen, Laser pointer interaction, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, p.17-22, March 2001, Seattle, Washington, United States [doi>10.1145/365024.365030]
• 5: R. Sukthankar, R. Stockton, and M. Mullin. Smarter presentations: Exploiting homography in camera-projector systems. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Computer Vision, 2001.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)
          Subjects: Input devices and strategies (e.g., mouse, touchscreen)

Additional Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.3 COMPUTER GRAPHICS
      I.3.1 Hardware architecture
          Subjects: Input devices
  I.4 IMAGE PROCESSING AND COMPUTER VISION
      I.4.1 Digitization and Image Capture
          Subjects: Imaging geometry; Camera calibration

General Terms:
Algorithms, Human Factors

Keywords:
interaction, laser pointer, tiled displays