WEEK1: FINAL PROJECT PROPOSAL

After working on robotically reconfigurable apartments for a while (space on demand), now I want to look at how we can create experiences on demand in a home. So, I´m making a low cost everywhere display.

A little bit of background

A typical vision of a home of the future always presents apartments with information displayed almost everywhere, where every other surface is a display or a projection.

· For cost and scalability issues, having every surface in the home be a display is still a little bit down the road.

· Everywhere projectors located in a fixed location also present a lot of scalability issues. There is never a perfect location for a projector, and because of the distance and the angles involved, this requires extremely expensive hardware. Also, you need a clear path for the projector to project from its fixed location.

· Interesting projects such as the LuminAR (Fluid Interfaces, MediaLab) or Microsoft´s Lightspace have started playing with the idea of projecting interactive information in multiple locations, but they are still limited to specific locations like a workstation.

Corning (www.corning.com), Microsoft (www.research.microsoft.com), LuminAR (www.fluid.media.mit.edu)

The gadget

I want to create a low cost projector that moves through your home and projects in every surface you can imagine. For the technical crew: I want to create a platform for a lightweight pico projector, a platform that not only is a moving head but also can translate within a flexible track in the ceiling.

This system would have different subsystems:

· Track: a flexible track that could be easily attached to your ceiling with the shape you want and that would carry the power (think about slot cars).

· Platform: a chassis that would translate through the track and have a free moving head mounted on it.

· Interface: a way of interacting with the platform and pointing it to whatever surface you want.

The pico projector would then be attached to this platform. Ideally, this pico projector could be synced to your smartphone (or laptop) and would have a camera integrated on it (like Lightspace or LuminAR), so that it recognizes gestures and touches on the projected display. Your mobile phone´s content would scape its physical form and be projected and manipulated everywhere you like in your home. In a nutshell, the real vision is a low cost everywhere interactive display.

Application

Example of a use case of the system in a home environment:

All in all, the philosophy behind this product is to try to bring the future into the homes of today.