iLight



iLight is a system to support collaboration over real-world objects, even when a user is not in the same physical location. The iLight uses an aligned camera and video projector  that allows a user to draw on a video image of a real-world scene using digital ink. The drawn marks are projected onto the scene, and are visible to remote users through the video image, as well as to local users in the vicinity of the projector.

iLight has several novel features. An "image copy" tool allows selected regions of the video image to be cut and pasted. Thus hand-drawn figures may be copied and pasted as if they were digital. Additionally, photos or other digital images may be dragged onto the iLight GUI, where they are then projected, and may be moved, copied, or otherwise manipulated.

For use with three-dimensional objects, our colleagues at Fuji Xerox jPAL in Nakai,Japan have developed an optical system that removes parallax using the half-silvered mirror arrangement. This removes parallax by aligning the camera's center of projection with that of the projector so that figures projected at any distance from the system will be aligned. We have also developed a custom-designed projector lens with substantially greater depth of field -- images remain in focus over a range of more than 20cm (an order of magnitude greater than conventional projectors).

  • Reach-Through-the-Screen: A New Metaphor for Remote Collaboration
    Jonathan Foote, Qiong Liu, Don Kimber, Patrick Chiu, and Frank Zhao
    Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science - Advances in Multimedia Information Processing, Proc. PCM 2004 5th Pacific Rim Conference on Multimedia, Tokyo, Japan Aizawa, K., Nakamura, ed., December 1, 2004 [PDF]
  • Remote Interactive Graffiti
    Jonathan Foote, Don Kimber, and Kazutaka Hirata
    Proc. ACM Multimedia 2004, October 12, 2004 [PDF]
  • US Patent 7,333,135: Method, apparatus, and system for remotely annotating a target
  • More at http://www.fxpal.com/?p=ilight"