Review of Transform of any Surface into a Touchscreen by LuminAR Bulb

Summary

Latest Research by a team led by Natan Linder at the MIT Media Lab’s Fluid Interfaces Group have developed a protoriaki device using a common bulb converts your desk or any flat surface into a touch screen elements Augmented Reality.

That’s the idea behind the LuminAR, developed by MIT Group. The device LuminAR consists of a desk lamp combines a Pico-projector, camera, and wireless computer to project interactive images onto any surface – and is small enough to screw into a standard light fixture. The forward LuminAr interactive images onto the surface of your desk and allows you to touch and interact with them.

Performance

LuminAR features a robotic arm that you can control with a wave of your hand and an augmented bulb armed with a with a projector, camera and wireless computer. Basically, it projects an image and turns any surface into a touch screen.

Linder and the other folks at MIT Media Lab’s Fluid Interfaces Group are ditching the robot arm, though, to cut costs and focus on perfecting the computer bulb portion of the project. Perhaps the craziest thing is that they created LuminAR two years ago (Audi named Linder the next Tony Stark). We may be a long way off from flying cars, but it’s pretty clear that the machines are winning and the robot apocalypse is inevitable.

Linder’s system uses a camera, a projector, and software to recognize objects and project imagery onto or around them, and also to function as a scanner. It connects to the Internet using Wi-Fi. Some capabilities of the prototype, such as object recognition, rely partly on software running on a remote cloud server.

The Luminar Lamp remembers where you’ve moved different applications, allowing you to organize your workspace accordingly, such as putting your twitter feed in a less distracting location, or projecting a Skype session onto a wall. The Lamp can also take snapshots of the work area, allowing you to quickly scan and share work documents seamlessly across multiple devices.

“I’m really excited by the way this would be used by engineers and designers,” says Linder, who believes it could be useful for any creative occupation that often involves working with paper and other tangible objects as well as computers.

Besides tracking your hands and fingers, the camera and image processing software could detect objects in the work space, such as a canned soft drink, and automatically display targeted advertising around it. One potential application would be projecting rich media, including product information, in a retail setting. In effect, browsing a store’s display could incorporate the same media and interactivity as a product web site.

activity as a product web site.