Flashscope is de­signed to pro­vide in-situ live in­for­ma­tion to field op­er­a­tors in an in­dus­trial en­vi­ron­ment. It was en­vis­aged to have a flash­light-like em­bod­i­ment: some­thing that fit well in the set­ting and could be used sim­ply by shin­ing on a ob­ject of in­ter­est - such as a tank or pump. Overlaying in­for­ma­tion on to the ob­ject it­self means there is no con­fu­sion about the re­la­tion of data to phys­i­cal en­tity, and it works well in col­lab­o­ra­tive sce­nar­ios. Because the pro­jec­tion also adapts based on what part of the ob­ject is pointed at, it can be used for ex­am­ple to high­light par­tic­u­lar com­po­nents, or to show a vir­tual wa­ter line - in prin­ci­ple, giv­ing you x-ray vi­sion. In an­other use case demon­strated in the video, the sys­tem is used to bring up a schematic di­a­gram.

The pro­to­type seen here uses a mico laser pro­jec­tor and stan­dard USB cam­era. Self-calibration be­tween sur­face and cam­era-pro­jec­tor pair is per­formed au­to­mat­i­cally by pe­ri­od­i­cally show­ing a checker­board pat­tern and then com­put­ing a trans­for­ma­tion ma­trix based on the im­age as seen by the cam­era. This al­lows the sys­tem to match the pro­jec­tion to the sur­face.

Computer vi­sion tech­niques were used for ob­ject iden­ti­fi­ca­tion and track­ing. The al­go­rithm used (SURF) re­quires that at least one sam­ple im­age of an ob­ject is avail­able be­fore­hand. Interestingly, the rich tex­ture of real-world ob­jects en­hance the re­li­a­bil­ity of the sys­tem. In the test case, tex­tures needed to be printed and stuck to the rel­a­tively fea­ture-less per­spex tanks.

More

• “Interaction with the dirty, dan­ger­ous, and dull.” Heyer, C. and Husøy, K. (2012). in­ter­ac­tions 19, 4 (July 2012), pp. 19-23. ACM Press
• “Investigations of Ubicomp in the Oil and Gas Industry.” Heyer, C. (2010) In Proceedings of the 12th ACM International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (UBICOMP2010), Copenhagen, Denmark. ACM Press, New York, pp. 61-64. ACM Portal