Browse Theses

The recent trend towards miniaturization of projection technology indicates that handheld devices will soon have the ability to project information onto any surface, thus enabling interaction and applications that are not possible with current handheld devices. This opens up an emerging research area on interaction using handheld projectors. With the ability to project information, a handheld device can surmount the limitations of its small internal screen by creating a larger information display on an external surface. By doing so, the display and interaction space can be expanded to cover almost an entire physical environment. Large amounts of data can be displayed, a rich interaction vocabulary can be supported, and multiple co-located people can share the viewing experience at the same time.

In this thesis, I investigate research issues involved in the design, implementation, and user performance and behaviors regarding the usage of interactive handheld projectors. I create a handheld projector interaction prototype platform, and explore interaction concepts and techniques to support both single and multi-user interaction using one or several handheld projectors. I also empirically investigate the user behaviors related to handheld projector usage, in terms of both quantitative interaction performance with pointing tasks, and qualitative social behaviors that emerge from a game application.

This work is a multi-faceted investigation on handheld projector interaction, and will provide the groundwork for future research and development of interactive handheld projectors.