Towards Ambient Projection for Intelligent Environments

Traditional desktop computing paradigms provide a poor interface for interacting with intelligent physical spaces. Although handheld devices are an important platform for interface agents, their displays are inadequate for many pervasive computing tasks and need to be supplemented by larger high-resolution displays. We propose the notion of augmenting indoor intelligent environments with ambient projection, where large numbers of projectors simultaneously illuminate the environment from multiple directions - analogous to the way in which ambient lighting permeates a room. Ambient projection could enable any suitable surface in an environment to be employed as a display device. Using such displays, the intelligent environment could present high-resolution information, proactively alert users who are not carrying handheld devices and annotate objects in the environment without instrumentation. Several challenges must be solved before such projected displays become a practical solution. This paper provides an overview of our research in computer vision for enabling interactive ambient projected displays.