Remote physical desktop sharing system has been widely studied in interactive surface research field to support distant collaborative works. Basically, the appearance of a work space on one site is captured by an overhead camera, and overlaid with that on the other site, and vice versa. One of the significant advantages of such systems is that users can visually share not only their documents or books but also context or non-verbal information such as the gestures of their hands and pens.
The previous graphical overlaying techniques assume that same documents or books are placed at the same positions and orientations on the both sites. Therefore, once a document is even slightly moved, the desktops are no longer correctly shared, which makes the collaborative works harder.
In this research, we propose to introduce a new concept to realize a physical desktop sharing environment where a document appearance on one site is geometrically aligned and projected onto the same document surface on the other site. In other words, the appearances of documents are transferred to the counterparts while the placements of the documents are not consistent. Furthermore, to increase the sense of face-to-face collaboration, we rotate the transferred hand region 180 degrees around the fingertip or pen point so that the projected hand is extended from a collaborator displayed on the flat panel display. This paper shows the technical details of the system such as computer vision-based document matching, thermo vision-based hand detection, and spatially consistent graphical representation of projected body image transition between documents. We also introduce a prototype system and some results from our proof-of-concept experiment.
As a result, we confirm that the proposed method provides a better collaborative environment where users can freely place their shared documents on their desktops.

Presenter(s)

Ryo Matsukage,Osaka University

Daisuke Iwai,Osaka University

Kosuke Sato,Osaka University