Desk Lamp Turns TableTop Into 3D

Switching on a lamp is all it takes to turn a table-top into an interactive map with this clever display, on show at the SIGGRAPH computer graphics and animation conference in Los Angeles. Multi-touch table-top displays project content through glass and respond to touch – imagine a table-sized smartphone screen. But researchers from the National Taiwan University in Taipei wanted to make these types of screens more appealing for multiple users. The idea is that several people could look at the same images, and get more information about the areas that interest them, using moveable objects. Users viewing an image such as a map projected onto a table-top display can zoom in on specific areas – seeing street names for example – simply by positioning the lamp device over them.

The team have also created a tablet computer which lets viewers see a two-dimensional scene in 3D. If you hold the computer over the area of the map you are interested in, a 3D view of that area will appear on the screen. The lamp also comes in a handheld flashlight design, which could be used with high-res scans of paintings in museums, for example, so that people could zoom in to see more detail of things that have caught their eye. Using the tablet computer to show up areas of a 3D map would allow several users, each with their own tablet, to examine and discuss the map at once. This could be useful for the military, when examining a map of unfamiliar territory and discussing strategy, for example.

More information:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19249-future-on-display-desk-lamp-turns-table-top-into-3d.html