Fellow reader Brett Jones sent me a video of his (and his team) work that they’re currently presenting at ISMAR, the AR conference :

Build Your World and Play In It: Interacting with Surface Particles on Complex Objects (ISMAR 2010) from Brett Jones on Vimeo.

The system scans the environment and then allows the user to interact with it using an IR stylus and UI elements that automatically adapt depending on the underlying physical surface.

We present a novel way of interacting with everyday objects by representing content as interactive surface particles. Users can build their own physical world, map virtual content onto their physical construction and play directly with the surface using a stylus. A surface particle representation allows programmed content to be created independent of the display object and to be reused on many surfaces. We demonstrated this idea through a projector-camera system that acquires the object geometry and enables direct interaction through an IR tracked stylus. We present three motivating example applications, each displayed on three example surfaces. We discuss a set of interaction techniques that show possible avenues for structuring interaction on complicated everyday objects, such as Surface Adaptive GUIs for menu selection. Through an informal evaluation and interviews with end users, we demonstrate the potential of interacting with surface particles and identify improvements necessary to make this interaction practical on everyday surfaces.

You can read the full paper here.

That’s a really nice way to interact with your everyday environment  without the need to wear (badly calibrated/tracked) AR glasses !