Our top picks for Kinect ingenuity #8
Engineers at the University of Munich have developed a shoulder-mounted system that tracks the movement of users' hands and fingers as they interact with images projected by the system onto a surface. The so-called Attjector system uses a Kinect sensor and an Optoma PK 201 picoprojector. The Kinect's depth image is used to track the position of the user's hand and monitor the scene to determine how the user's fingers are interacting with the display. Both the Kinect sensor and the Optoma picoprojector are seated in a gimbaled mount with three freedoms of rotation. The mount is actively stabilized, enabling it to react quickly to sudden user movements so that the projected image remains stable at all times. To perform the stabilization, the gimbaled mount is equipped with an accelerometer, a gyroscope, and three servo motors. The researchers say that their prototype system not only relieves a user from the task of controlling a projector but also gives the user the freedom to interact naturally with the images projected from it.
