Smart building blocks combined
with Microsoft's Surface
interactive table-top computer have taken touch-screen
interaction into the third dimension, which engineers or architects
could use to develop designs.
Touch screens are becoming standard for
smartphones and beginning to appear in personal computers too:
last year,
Microsoft launched Surface, a computer in the form of a table
with a touch-screen top. But, as the name suggests, touch screens
only work with direct contact.
Now, Patrick Baudisch, Torsten Becker and Frederik Rudeck at the
Hasso Plattner Institute at the University of Potsdam in Germany
have lifted the interaction away from the screen. When their
building blocks, or Luminos, are stacked to form complicated
structures on top of a Surface screen, the computer can map the
building as it grows.
Vertical hold
Each Lumino block has a pattern on its base that identifies its
3D shape, and the Surface table can read them using its four
internal cameras that peer up at the acrylic top. That means the
computer can build up a 3D picture of what lies on its surface.
The Luminos can also make themselves known to the Surface when
they're stacked up, however. They are packed with fibre-optic
threads that ferry the pattern of any block placed on top of
another down to the screen. So, although a second storey Lumino
isn't in direct contact with the touch screen, the computer knows
it's there
(see video).
As blocks stack up, the risk increases that the patterns from
different layers of Luminos will become too jumbled for the screen
to interpret. But the fibre-optic bundles are angled so that the
pattern visible to the screen at the bottom of a stack includes
parts of the patterns of all its blocks. That can allow the screen
to recognise stacks up to 10 blocks high.
No limits
"Many people think of table tops as flat – surely one of the
reasons why Microsoft opted for the name 'Surface'," says Baudisch.
"We, in contrast, think of the table much more broadly. With Lumino
we explore the table as a platform for any type of tangible
interaction – here a three-dimensional world."
Earlier attempts to make similar things possible have typically
required the building blocks to contain electronics and batteries,
says Baudisch. That imposed "huge requirements on logistics and
maintenance, making it all but impossible to go beyond simple toy
applications," he says. "Luminos will allow designers of tangible
applications to bypass these limitations."
Jan Borchers at RWTH Aachen University in Germany has worked on
table tops that recognise objects in 2D. "The fundamental benefit
of these tangibles on table tops is that users can feel them when
operating them," he says. Previous generations of computers relied
simply on "an eye to watch the computer screen and a few digits to
press keyboard and mouse buttons. This is now changing, as embedded
computers are becoming ubiquitous."
Although the Lumino blocks are only prototypes at present,
Baudisch thinks further development could produce a tool for
engineers or architects. "For example, the Lumino construction kit
application
[shown in the
video above] demonstrates how the table can critique
constructions and suggest how to improve them."
Video: Microsoft Surface can make you
healthy