LOST the TV remote control again? Never mind ? just create another one on the arm of your sofa with a swish of your hand. While you are at it, why not turn the top of your coffee table into a lighting controller, so you can dim your lamps while you kick back and watch a movie. The system that makes this happen, called WorldKit, is working in Chris Harrison's lab at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. And it could be in our homes in the next five years, he says.
WorldKit combines cameras, projectors and computers to allow everyday surfaces like walls, tables, doors and worktops to host interactive controllers for gadgets including TVs, digital video recorders, hi-fis or room lighting.
The system uses a Microsoft Kinect depth camera to pinpoint which surface your swishing hand is requesting to become a controller. As you move your hand back and forth, you say out loud what you want the surface to turn into ? for example, "TV remote". WorldKit's software uses voice recognition to work out what type of remote you want and a digital projector on the ceiling beams an image of that controller onto the chosen surface. The Kinect camera then works out which buttons you are pressing. Harrison's team will demonstrate the system this week at CHI 2013, a conference on human-computer interaction, in Paris, France.
Harrison says the system will be useful when small "pico" projectors have become cheap and power-efficient enough to be dotted around our homes. "No one has yet come up with the killer app that will drive projector prices down. WorldKit might be that app," he says.
The system has other uses. For instance, it could beam interactive cookery instructions onto a kitchen worktop, creating a space for each ingredient to be placed in. These spaces then light up as software takes you through the recipe.
The technology impresses Patrick Baudisch, a computer scientist at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany, whose team will be presenting a way to track people in rooms using interactive floors
at CHI 2013. "WorldKit looks like a very useful step forward in ubiquitous computing. It will help the field move forward and bring smart home applications a step closer to reality," he says.
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