Humble paper – cheap, flexible, renewable – is becoming a medium of choice for ubiquitous computing through the popularization of augmented reality tags that can be read by cell phone and computer cameras everywhere. Above is a very elaborate simulation software running on a tangible interface – all controlled by printed paper. The videos shows a stock room in miniature, on top of which is projected data reflecting the capacity for storage and the speed of loading and unloading the shelves. The high-resolution projector makes it possible to project dynamic content onto pieces of paper even as these are rotated, blurring the line between the ink and the pixels. This was a project called TinkerSheets presented at TEI’09 by
Guillaume Zufferey, Patrick Jermann, Aurélien Lucchi, and Pierre Dillenbourg – the paper is here.
The system works because each piece of paper has a printed tag recognizable to the computer – these are the weird postage stamp-sized grids of black and white pixels everywhere. Of course, the tags themselves can be pretty ugly to us humans – that’s why popular optical tags made for the reacTIVision system were designed to appeal through anthropomorphic, cellular designs. Below is a screengrab from a popular ‘fiducial marker’ (optical tag) generator called fid.gen:
But these pixels still don’t mean anything to us – that’s why Enrico Costanza and Jeffrey Huang created Designable Visual Markers, where computers are trained to recognize any image – even these hand-drawn cartoons:
Maybe one day people will use drawings to help think, invent and present ideas.