On his way to the RTT Conference in Vienna, Daniel Leithinger came for a short visit to the Media Interaction Lab. While he was here he presented his current project called “City Planning Space” that he worked on at the IML. City Planning Space facilitates multiple input devices (Anoto pens and 3D-trackers) and multiple displays to support architects during the early prototyping of new buildings. It provides a 2D map on a tabletop display and a 3D visualization of the area on a normal horizontal screen. Using digital pens a user can create new buildings on the tabletop. To see how such a building influences the surroundings users can look at the 3D view on the vertical display and navigate through it with the 3D tracker. We are also proud to announce that Daniel will continue his research studies at the MIT MediaLab soon.
Author Archive for atomas
From February 18 to 20 the research-community for Tangible User Interfaces came together at the 2nd conference on Tangible Embedded Interaction in Bonn, Germany. Matt Jervis from University of Waikato and Thomas from the MI-Lab presented the results of their work on enhanced filing folders and cabinets called “Aroo - Smart Folders“. One of the conference highlights was the keynote talk by Hiroshi Ishii presenting the vision behind his work and that it might effect people in 200 years (see picture in more…)
We just uploaded more press-related material in our press section. Now you can download our logo in several formats and the MIL Icon.
A view weeks ago we posted a video about using the Wiimote for tracking fingers. This technique was extended recently to track pens on any flat surface like a projection screen or even a laptop display. According to Johnny Chung Lee the Wiimote can track up to four points simultaneously.
This week we got our hands on the brand new Toshiba ex20 short-throw projector to test it in a rear projection setup. Some facts about the projector: XGA, 130% lens offset, ~0.68 throw-ratio (distance-to-image-width), 2300 Ansi lumen, DLP.
The test results were quite good. Because of the high lens offset it’s easy to use in combination with a mirror. The mirror and projector can be simply mounted in a angle of 90°. Furthermore, the projected image was really good. Especially, the usual DLP-”rainbow/flickering” was not strongly visible. At least not for our human eyes.
A drawback we figured out is the chroma error of the lens. At the top of the image the blue/yellow distortion is about the size of one pixel as it is visible in this picture. After some more tests we figured out that the yellow color is really nice after all. The test images yellow just wasn’t saturated enough.
An interesting video about how to use the Wiimote for finger tracking.

