The annual
meeting of the ACM’s Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive
Techniques, SIGGRAPH
2009, takes place in New Orleans this week. The event brings together some
of the world’s best digital artists and computer researchers and is a showcase
for some interesting new interfaces.
Here are five
particularly cool ideas that will be on display at this year’s event.
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1.
Touchable Holography
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A team of
researchers at the University of Tokyo led by Hiroyuki
Shinoda has developed a display that lets users “touch” objects that appear
to float in space in front of them.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Y
The virtual
objects appear in mid-air thanks to an LCD and a concave mirror. The sensation
of touching the objects is created using an ultrasound device positioned below
the LCD and mirror. The airborne ultrasound tactile device used to produce the
sensation of touch was demoed at SIGGRAPH in 2008.
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2.
Augmented Reality for Ordinary Toys
Frantz Lasorne, a student
at L’École de Design in France, has invented an ingenious way to breathe new
life into old toys.
Lasorne’s Scope display automatically recognizes ordinary toys that
have been mounted onto platforms covered with hexagonal patterns. Viewed
through the augmented reality display, these patterns become
interactive buttons and can be used to make virtual modifications to the toy.
As the video below shows, a Lego person can, for instance, be instantly armed
with a giant virtual bazooka.
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3.
Hyper-Realistic Virtual Reality
A team from INRIA
and Grenoble Universities in France will demo a new virtual reality system
called Virtualization
Gate that tracks users’ movements very accurately using multiple cameras,
allowing them to interact with virtual objects with new realism.
The
user wears a head-mounted display (HMD) and moves through a virtual space while
several cameras track his movement. The video here shows a guy kicking over
virtual vases and pushing around a virtual representation of himself. A cluster
of PCs is needed to perform the necessary image capture and 3D modeling.
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4.
3D Teleconferencing
Researchers
at the University of Southern California will demo Headspin, a 3D
teleconferencing system that maintains eye contact between a three-dimensional
head and several participants on the other end of a connection.
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To capture an
image, a polarized beam-splitter “places” the camera virtually near
the eyes of the speaker. The 3D display works by projecting high-speed video
onto a rapidly spinning aluminum disk to generate an accurate image for each
viewer.
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5.
Scratchable Input
Chris Harrison, a
researcher at Carnegie Mellon University whose human-computer
interaction work we’ve written about previously, will demonstrate his new scratch input technology. The system turns any surface into
an instant input device by sensing the unique sound produced when a fingernail
is dragged across it.
The interface
is small enough to fit into a mobile device, Harrison says, and could thereby
turn any surface the device is placed upon into an interface.
