Creative Projection

A collection of videos highlighting the fun and creative uses of projectors.

NuFormer strikes again--this time in China while Mercedes-Benz intros their new B-Class. Mercedes seems to have latched on to the power of the projector as 3D projection mapping is becoming a fixture at their launch events. Fortunately for mapping hounds, they employ the services of NuFormer -a team out of the Netherlands bent on evolution in the art. Before now projection mapping would occur with the images projected onto the body of a car.more

Microsoft Research appears to be deep into work on augmented reality as is evidenced by many of the concept videos they've released recently. The Beamatron concept uses a Xbox 360 Kinect motion-capture camera. The device can sense and project graphics anywhere in the room and as it moves it creates a 3D model of the environment using Kinect technology. This video features a researcher driving a virtual car over real surfaces. Note the way the system reacts.

Microsoft Research is certainly giving us a lot to talk about these days. The Holoflector as it's been named, is a device which pairs a large translucent mirror with an LCD panel behind it and a Kinect camera on top of it. What you'll be reminded of as you watch the video is a scene out of a futuristic film.

The combination of the mirror and the LCD allows the user to see their reflection but to have that reflection altered by whatever the LCD panel displays. The Kinect component of course tracks the body movements but they key is matching the renderings of the LCD with those movements.

Here is another great video from TK labs featuring the Lightbeam "nomadic" pico projector. It's actually Microsoft Kinect paired with an AAXA L1 Pico Projector with the intent of creating a projector that can track and reorient the image it projects so that any surface can become suitable for display. Potentially anywhere will become fair game for projection. Make sure you don't miss the trick with the coffee mug at the end of the video.

This is rear-projection, with a Kinect doing head tracking to present a correct perspective view of virtual objects. The creator, whose Vimeo handle is Mediadog holds the video camera to his eye as he moves about in front of the screen. The software uses the Kinect to track the position of his head relative to the screen and creates the graphics as the objects themselves would look from that perspective giving the impression that he is actually moving around real things. The great part of this video is that the artist clearly labels what he is doing as he's doing it. There is some very interesting work going on in his world as his website makes obvious.

The background music sets the tone for this eerie use of the Kinect for live 3D capture and overlay projection using a Hitachi XGA projector. The screen is holographic-- a "Transscreen"™ developed by Laser Magic.

More interesting projector experiments happening at Meiji University... This video introduces presentation software that has a sort of sixth sense. As such it could turn the current state of presentions on its head. Using C# and a Kinect SDK and moving away from a PowerPoint environment to store text positioning coordinates in Excel, this device would likley shift audience focus from the slides and allow a presenter to at least share the spotlight with his or her bullet points.

Thank you Katie with TI DLP for sending us the link to the Snowglobe Project featured at the CHI 2011(Computer-Human Interaction) conference in Vancouver BC this month. Using a DepthQ DLP 3D-Ready projector, two Microsoft Kinect sensors and some additional hardware and software, students from Queens University made a “snowglobe” display that lets users manipulate projected 3D objects using just their hands. Check out another example of a spherical display seeking to give "flat screeners" a more "global" perspective with the Eye of Sauron.