Augment Reality with cool new Lightbeam Pico Projector

The Lightbeam projector is a pico projector. While just a few years ago that might have been cool enough, these days you need something truly epic to be noticed. And the Lightbeam has it.

It includes object tracking, for augmented reality.

Say you want to use a sheet of paper as a screen to show some info. Just hold it up in front of the projector, and the projector will project onto it. As you move the sheet around, the projector will keep track of it, continuing to project onto it for as long as it is in range of the device, which is about 30 degrees from its center.

Further, the type of information that gets displayed is dependent on what object you hold up. A piece of white paper might be a Flickr display, for example, but a book might show some relevant information about it.

But that’s not all. As a demonstration, the team who built it also demonstrated its interactivity potential by creating digital interfaces from every day objects. Like a coffee cup.

Give the coffee cup a twist, and you can flip through apps as if you were tabbing through them. The coffee cup becomes a knob to control the screen by.

This is a nifty little project that shows how close we are to augmenting our world through digital information. Imagine a system like this coupled to an operating system designed for it, tie it in with an object recognizing library like Google Goggles. With a few basic settings, you could quickly create a fully tactile computer where your coffee cup tabs, a piece of paper is your display, folding the paper in half is archiving it, and crumpling it up is throwing it away. A trivial example, true, and wasteful, but it speaks to the flexibility of the idea.

The team behind it will be presenting their tech in person at CHI 2012.

The Verge Photo by : LightBeam