Handheld Laser Projector

Enrico got for his project a handheld laser projector. The nice thing about this technology is that the projected image is always in focus - it does not matter if you move the projector or if you project on an uneven surface. The AAXA L1 Laser Pico Projector (even though there are plenty of things that can be improved, noise for a start) provides some inspiration what will become possible if these devices will be common in mobile phones. In Lancaster Enrico explored already 2007/2008 some of the usage scenarios and interaction techniques [1] and I am really curious of further ones. There was a workshop at Pervasive 2010 looking at current research on personal projectors [2].

With this piece of technology we can also move on the idea of a device where interactive shell and functional core of a product is separated. We have published the concept as work in progress at CHI [3] and perhaps it is now time to look into a realistic implementation using such a laser projector.

[1] Hang, A., Rukzio, E., and Greaves, A. 2008. Projector phone: a study of using mobile phones with integrated projector for interaction with maps. In Proceedings of the 10th international Conference on Human Computer interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (Amsterdam, The Netherlands, September 02 - 05, 2008). MobileHCI '08. ACM, New York, NY, 207-216. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1409240.1409263

[2] UBIPROJECTION 2010 http://eis.comp.lancs.ac.uk/workshops/ubiproject2010/

[3] Doering, T., Pfleging, B., Kray, C., and Schmidt, A. 2010. Design by physical composition for complex tangible user interfaces. In Proceedings of the 28th of the international Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Atlanta, Georgia, USA, April 10 - 15, 2010). CHI EA '10. ACM, New York, NY, 3541-3546. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1753846.1754015