Touch-Sensitive Video-Screen Floor Is in Step With You
From: New Scientist - 01/23/2013
By: Paul Marks 

Hasso Plattner Institute researchers have developed an eight-square-meter
pressure-sensing floor that can recognize users by their weight, track their
movements, and display video for them to interact with. The researchers say
the technology could lead to a variety of ways to control objects in the
home, play games, or assist older or disabled people. The prototype floor
consists of a piece of 6.4-centimeter-thick glass installed in a hole cut
into a standard floor, and an infrared camera and high-resolution video
projector in the room below that tracks footprints and beams video onto the
glass. "This pressure sensor is of such high resolution that the floor can
recognize anything from shoe prints to fabric textures to someone's knees,"
says the Hasso Plattner Institute's Patrick Baudisch. The researchers have
developed software that recognizes what those objects are doing and responds
by generating relevant video. "The future of computer interfaces is to become
more sensitive to people's needs," says New York University's Ken Perlin. "A
floor that understands where you are and what you are doing is a logical step
in that direction."  

Read the entire article and view a video (1:13) at:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21729015.800-touchsensitive-videoscreen-floor-is-in-step-with-you.html

Links:
Patrick Baudisch
http://www.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/personen/professoren/patrickbaudisch.html?L=1

Human Computer Interaction Group
http://www.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/baudisch/home.html

Multitoe
http://www.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/baudisch/projects/multitoe.html?L=1