Kinect keeps your body-mounted projector steady

Paul Marks, chief technology correspondent

(Image: S. Kratz, M. Rohs, F. Reitberger, J. Moldenhauer, University of Munich)

Are you the kind of person who likes to give your colleagues (or any friends you may have left) a PowerPoint presentation at the drop of a hat? If so, you could be a prime customer for the Kinect-powered wearable projector that's being developed by Sven Kratz and colleagues at the University of Munich in Germany.

Called the Attjector - short for attention projector - their shoulder-mounted system is designed to project slides onto a wall at precisely the point your attention is focussed. It does so using a microchip-based picoprojector to deliver a bright image of your bullet points, holiday snaps or pet pictures sent via Bluetooth from a PowerPoint style app on a phone.

But how does it know where to project the image? Enter Kinect, the contactless, gesture-based interaction system from Microsoft.

The projector is mounted on a movable motor-driven gimbal (see it being tested here) so that its projection direction can be steered to where you need it. A Kinect depth camera, mounted beside the projector seeks out the image of your hand and dominant fingers as you point out key facets in your presentation - and drives the gimbal motor to ensure the projection is always pointed to the area where your hand is gesturing.

Why do this? Kratz and colleagues say that holding a phone projector with one hand while pointing at a presentation with the other creates a wobbly mess - and that auto-tracking with Kinect sorts this out. It may have all the makings of a solution in search of a problem, but the Munich team are confident the idea has legs. Or shoulders. They'll now use a headset to monitor eye-gaze to further refine the Attjector's ability to focus on your attention point.

Presented at The First Workshop on Kinect in Pervasive Computing, held in Newcastle, UK, in mid-June, Attjector builds on ideas like Microsoft Research's astonishing LightSpace system, which allows users to "pick up" parts of a projected presentation as a dot of light in their palm - and place it magically elsewhere in a room.

Source: http://feeds.newscientist.com/c/749/f/10897/s/21658665/l/0L0Snewscientist0N0Cblogs0Conepercent0C20A120C0A70Cshow0Epowerpoints0Eanywhere0Ewith0Bhtml0DDCMP0FOTC0Erss0Gnsref0Fonline0Enews/story01.htm

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