{"id":64,"date":"2011-10-20T04:05:00","date_gmt":"2011-10-20T04:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mishmashmakers.com\/michelle\/?p=64"},"modified":"2017-02-08T14:50:45","modified_gmt":"2017-02-08T19:50:45","slug":"uist-2011-publication-medusa-aka-the-secret-project-from-my-internship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mishmashmakers.com\/michelle\/2011\/10\/uist-2011-publication-medusa-aka-the-secret-project-from-my-internship\/","title":{"rendered":"UIST 2011 Publication! – Medusa"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>So now that UIST 2011 is officially over, I can post about the work that I did at Autodesk Research<\/a> in January of 2010! I\u2019m super excited to finally get to talk about all my hard work and the awesome project (Medusa) that I got to work on. For now, I just want to share the video and a brief description of what I did (it was 4 months of work after all!). The full paper outlining Medusa (\u2018Medusa: a proximity-aware multi-touch tabletop\u2019) can be found here<\/a>.\n

So in short, Medusa is a Microsoft Surface that has been instrumented with 138 proximity sensors (sort of like a 1 pixel Microsoft Kinect). These proximity sensors enable the Surface to sense users as they move around the tabletop, and detect a user\u2019s hands and arms above the display area of the Surface. Not only are these sensors inexpensive and simple to configure, but also they enable an integrated hardware solution, without requiring any markers, cameras, or other sensing devices external to the display platform itself.\u00a0 <\/a><\/p>\n

As Medusa has an awareness of users\u2019 locations, it can for example, identify touch points by user, and disambiguate between touches made with left or right hands. It can also make use of the touch-based\u00a0information\u00a0provided from the Surface to map touch points to specific users (as well as identify which hand they used, right or left), even in multi-user\u00a0scenarios.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Using all of this information, there are an infinite number of ways that multi-touch interaction with a horizontal display can be enhanced and augmented. In the video below, I (along with Tovi Grossman),\u00a0demonstrate\u00a0a few of the techniques that we explored.<\/p>\n