Toto Tvalavadze

Research · Ambient Computing · 023

Could a projector on a gimbal point at any shelf?

· Question

An idea to test: a projector and a camera on a motorized gimbal, mounted on the ceiling, that can point anywhere in the room. The twin already knows every surface, so for any target, whether a shelf, a drawer front, or a stretch of wall, it could work out exactly which surface the projector will hit, pre-warp the image for that angle and distance, and project data onto it.

The first use is finding books. The Study IVAR is mostly books, and a search could end with light on the right spine instead of a highlight on a screen. It’s the sharper version of brightening the shelf spots when an answer lands on a shelf.

What I don’t know yet: how precisely an affordable gimbal can aim, whether a small projector stays bright and sharp at that distance and angle, and how to calibrate the projector’s position and lens against the model, so that what the twin computes lands where it should.

Two research systems to read first. IBM’s Everywhere Displays projector (2001) steered a projector’s light onto different surfaces of a room with a rotating mirror, and already ran into brightness, oblique distortion, focus, and obstruction. Microsoft Research’s Beamatron (2012) put a projector and a Kinect on a pan-and-tilt platform and reasoned about the room in 3D from live depth data.