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PICOntrol: using a handheld projector for direct control of physical devices through visible light

Published: 07 October 2012 Publication History

Abstract

Today's environments are populated with a growing number of electric devices which come in diverse form factors and provide a plethora of functions. However, rich interaction with these devices can become challenging if they need be controlled from a distance, or are too small to accommodate user interfaces on their own. In this work, we explore PICOntrol, a new approach using an off-the-shelf handheld pico projector for direct control of physical devices through visible light. The projected image serves a dual purpose by simultaneously presenting a visible interface to the user, and transmitting embedded control information to inexpensive sensor units integrated with the devices. To use PICOntrol, the user points the handheld projector at a target device, overlays a projected user interface on its sensor unit, and performs various GUI-style or gestural interactions. PICOntrol enables direct, visible, and rich interactions with various physical devices without requiring central infrastructure. We present our prototype implementation as well as explorations of its interaction space through various application examples.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    UIST '12: Proceedings of the 25th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology
    October 2012
    608 pages
    ISBN:9781450315807
    DOI:10.1145/2380116
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 07 October 2012

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    Author Tags

    1. handheld projector
    2. physical devices
    3. visible light communication

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    • (2023)RagRug: A Toolkit for Situated AnalyticsIEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics10.1109/TVCG.2022.315705829:7(3281-3297)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2023
    • (2022)Light-In-Light-Out (Li-Lo) Displays: Harvesting and Manipulating Light to Provide Novel Forms of CommunicationProceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3491102.3517730(1-15)Online publication date: 29-Apr-2022
    • (2022)Visible Light Positioning Based on Collaborative LEDs and Edge ComputingIEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems10.1109/TCSS.2021.31096319:1(324-335)Online publication date: Feb-2022
    • (2022)DarkVLP: “Lights-Off” Visible-Light PositioningIEEE Internet of Things Journal10.1109/JIOT.2021.31257959:13(11071-11084)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2022
    • (2021)Detecting Position and Direction of a Device by Swept Frequency of Microwave Using Two-Dimensional Communication SystemSICE Journal of Control, Measurement, and System Integration10.9746/jcmsi.12.11612:3(116-123)Online publication date: 18-Jan-2021
    • (2020)[Paper] Imperceptible Color Vibration for Screen-Camera Communication via 2D Binary PatternITE Transactions on Media Technology and Applications10.3169/mta.8.1708:3(170-185)Online publication date: 2020
    • (2020)Interactive Minimal Latency Laser Graphics PipelineSIGGRAPH Asia 2020 Emerging Technologies10.1145/3415255.3422885(1-2)Online publication date: 4-Dec-2020
    • (2020)The Effect of Room Complexity on Physical Object Selection Performance in 3-D Mobile User InterfacesIEEE Transactions on Human-Machine Systems10.1109/THMS.2020.298475050:4(349-357)Online publication date: Aug-2020
    • (2019)NavigaTorch: Projection-based Robot Control Interface using High-speed Handheld ProjectorSIGGRAPH Asia 2019 Emerging Technologies10.1145/3355049.3360538(31-33)Online publication date: 17-Nov-2019
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