Building a Digital Playing Desk

Mario Valente writes "Using my glass topped desk it should probably be possible to build your own digital playing desk, commonly referred in VR circles as a projection-table. I guess I'd need at least an LCD projector for rear-projection onto the desk and a mouse/finger tracker. Has anyone had experience building this type of stuff ? Are there any non-highend commercial systems available? -- Mario Valente"

If this is what I think it is... i'll take one pls

[jpt.d]

http://www.barco.com/projection_systems/downloads/ baron.pdf

Let me get this straight - does this actually project a 3d image?

Well...

[bpb213]

i dont know what all these commercial displays offer, besides a high quality display.
What i think you could do, is laminate the bottom of the glass with a semi opaque something or other, and project onto that. Then you would have to use some sort of LCD shutter glasses and a very high refresh on your projector.
I know in the past there used to be cheap shutter glasses with a video card adapter or driver that automatically turned openGL or mabye Glide, not sure which, into the Left-Right images used by the glasses to give the monitor a "3D" look.
Im pretty sure LCD shutter glasses come pretty small nowadays, but it might take some custom software to actually get a 3D os in the air.

Unless i completely missed the point and you dont even want a 3D desktop :)

as for Finger/hand tracking, i know of plenty of research going on at my college about this, particularly in gesture recognition, but i dont know of any commercial products, besides maybe the two "virtual" keyboards featured previosly on slashdot - (http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/03/20/12352 44&mode=thread) and one other that i cant find the link to atm, that you were on your wrists and it "feels" where your fingers are.

2nd Link

[bpb213]

Found that other "virtual Keyboard" http://www.senseboard.com/

two systems: sivit or one i saw at siggraph 2000

[srinner]

i know tow systems capable of doing similar things - there's sivit (aka "virtual touchscreen") by siemens - a system consisting of a projector, a infrared source, a camera and a pc with a framegrabber-card - if you put your hand on the projection surface the software recognises your finger and the mousecursor is controlled by your finger - the software is Windows only and the complete system is quite expensive.
Much more interesting was a system i saw at SIGGRAPH 2000 - i think it was done by some students at the university of washington - it was using rear projection and was able to track more objects

Stuart Anderson's

[sharkey]

Cattle Company here in Indy has one (or they did, the last time I was there). Two people sit on opposite ends, and they can play Pac-Man, right through the top of the table!!