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"

Comments

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.