| In recent years, interactive display systems and products which are represented by multi-touch systems and interactive projection systems have been widely used. For example, the Apple's iPhone multi-touch smart phone, Microsoft's Surface interactive table and interactive projection system from GestureTek Inc. Such applications provide the users with intuitive and friendly interactive experience. Now they have gradually changed user habits and became an emerging type of applications. It also shows important industrial significance and commercial value.Most of the existing interactive display systems are constructed by single PC and one projector, use computer-vision technologies to do interactive tracking. This low-cost and easy-to-build method has been widely used in the industry and academia. However, limited by PC processing power, the projector hardware and operating system restriction, the display resolution and display area are not big enough which cannot meet the user's requirement nowadays. Also, the existing interactive display program development toolkits are simple. Normally, these toolkits only contain interactive events receiving and processing modules, which do not give enough support on interactive effects developing. This needs the developers give long period of heavy work on interactive program developing.To solve this problem, this paper proposes a distributed interactive projection system based on multi-channel video. Compared with the existing works, our system has these advantages:1) It is constructed under the central node based distributed architecture. Slave nodes only deal with the video capturing and video processing phrases. The interactive tracking job is done by central node when receives all the slaves nodes'processing results. In this way, we can overcome the interactive detecting error problem caused by parts of the interactive video.2) Taking the advantages of the continuity between two successive video frames, our system splits the video frame to several grids and only sends the changed grids between two frames, which can reduce the required bandwidth and sharply increase the supported slave node number.3) Also we provide a full set of software development toolkits for this distributed interactive display programs. This toolkit includes not only display area controlling and multi-projector rendering modules, but the multi-touch gesture library, interactive feedbacks and artificial intelligence assistance modules, which can be used by developers to build multi-touch applications and extra-large interactive projection applications.Now, we have implemented several effect programs with our toolkits, such as interactive flowers, smart fishes, multi-touch picture viewer, multi-user painter and interactive bar, etc. Also, this technology has been successfully used in the extra-large interactive projection system in Tibet Museum of Shanghai World Expo 2010. The testing results and applications show that our system takes low bandwidth in the runtime and is very practical and scalable. |
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