Visual Panel: From An Ordinary Paper To A Wireless and Mobile Input Device

  • Ying Wu ,
  • Ying Shan ,
  • Zhengyou Zhang ,
  • Steven Shafer

MSR-TR-2000-112 |

In many intelligent environments, instead of using conventional mice and keyboards, people are looking for an intuitive, immersive and cost-efficient interaction device. This paper presents a vision-based gesture interface system, VISUAL PANEL, which employs an arbitrary quadrangle-shaped panel (e.g., an ordinary paper) and a tip pointer (e.g., fingertip) as an intuitive input device. The system can accurately and reliably track the panel and the tip pointer. The panel tracking continuously determines the projective mapping between the panel at the current position and the display, which in turn maps the tip position to the corresponding position on the display. By detecting the clicking and dragging actions, the system can fulfill many tasks such as controlling a remote large display, and simulating a physical keyboard. Users can naturally use their fingers or other tip pointers to issue commands and type texts. The system, which runs at around 22Hz on PIII 800MHz PC, is scalable and extensible. Further potential applications include multiple-persons interactions.