CAREER: Ubiquitous Displays Via a Distributed Framework

University Of California-Irvine, Irvine CA

Investigators

Abstract

"This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5)." In this project the PI will explore a new paradigm where displays are not mere carriers of information but rather active members of the workspace capable of interacting with data, users, the environment, and other displays. The goal is to seamlessly integrate such active displays into the collaborative workspace of the future, so that they become ubiquitous and critical components. To these ends, the PI plans to utilize a projector augmented with sensors along with an embedded computation and communication unit. She will investigate the challenges and capabilities resulting from instrumenting a workspace with a network of such projectors, including novel distributed methodologies to: (a) cover the existing surfaces (walls, floors, etc.), which can deviate considerably from planar, white and Lambertian, with multiple active displays; (b) provide scalability and reconfigurability (in terms of scale, resolution and form factor) of displays; and (c) provide a framework for shared viewing and interaction modalities for multiple users. Achieving such objectives will require the ability to register imagery globally with the underlying display surface via multiple local corrections. For interaction with users, the PI will develop distributed methodologies for gesture-tracking and use them as the cornerstone for a gesture-based shared interaction modality for large-scale data visualization and modification. For interaction with data, application-independent distributed windows management middleware (tentatively dubbed overloaded windows) will be developed. The new technologies will be combined to provide a novel "data mobilizer" application for scanning, storing and interacting with life-size image-like artifacts. All of these technologies will be evaluated in collaboration with the Environment to Environment Communication (E2E) project at National University of Singapore (NUS). Project outcomes will include novel ways for precise and scalable digital control of light on large architectures, distributed scene reconstruction for large inside-looking-out environments, metrics to evaluate optimal sampling criteria for reconstructing such scenes, design criteria to accommodate multiple viewers in a collaborative environment, novel distributed shared-interaction modalities in such environments, and a new distributed data management paradigm via overloaded windows. Broader Impacts: This project will lead to gesture-based multi-user interaction modalities for mobilizing data in collaborative environments for next-generation visualization, training and simulation applications with a display resolution that is an order of magnitude higher than what is currently available yet which can be maintained and deployed much more easily. The diverse potential applications include digital display domes for education and entertainment purposes, precise digital lighting techniques for exploration of cultural heritage such as large edifices, and novel body-based interaction tools for creating life-size artistic expressions.