i-m-Top: An interactive multi-resolution tabletop system accommodating to multi-resolution human vision

Abstract

For human vision, the resolution of visual perception is not uniform across the entire eye, in which the fovea, a dimple on the central retina, provides our highest resolution vision. While many researchers have focused on building a large homogeneous high-resolution display for better visual quality, our approach goes a step further to exploit the variable-resolution nature of human vision on tabletop systems. In this work, we developed an innovative tabletop display system, called i-m-top (interactive multi-resolution tabletop), featuring not only multi-touch, but also multi-resolution display accommodating to the multi-resolution characteristics of human vision. Based on this characteristic, i-m-top provides a high-resolution projection image in the foveal region with a steerable projector, while providing a low-resolution projection image in the peripheral region with a wide-angle fixed projector. With this configuration, we are able to realize an interactive high-resolution display in a cost-effective way. To hide the engineering challenges posed by the unique hardware configuration, we also develop a software development toolkit - the i-m-Top SDK - for rapid prototyping multi-resolution and multi-touch applications, to help push forward research in this field.