ImpactTV:
Controlling Media with Physical Objects

ImpactTV is easy. If you want to watch basketball, you throw a basketball at the screen and it switches to the basketball game. If you want to watch baseball, you throw a baseball. If you want the kids channel, you throw a teddy bear. A very intuitive interface, as demonstrated by a 5 year old kid who did not need any instructions, but kept on throwing all sort of objects at it.

In scientific terms, ImpactTV is a system where physical objects contain digital information, without actually holding any data. It is a unique interface to the old problem of the remote control.

The challenge was to find a way recognizing the different objects. We did not want to put a battery in a basketball (not a very "natural" interface), so decided to use vision detection. A camera pointing at the screen is triggered by a microphone that picks up the sound when an object is thrown at the screen. It then looks at the screen and tries to identify the object by its colour and size. The problem we encountered was that because you might have watched basketball, and thrown a baseball, the camera might also pick up the basketball that was shown on screen. So we came up with a unique way of polarizing the light coming out of the projector, and making it invisible for the camera.

		Streaming (300 kbps)	Download (7 MB)
	Real	impactTV	impacttv.rm
	Windows	impactTV	impacttv.wmv
	Quicktime	impactTV	impacttv.mov

Research abstract

People are comfortable with the notion of remote controls and have been using them to change the settings of their TV sets for a long time. However, as remote controls become more and more complicated due to the escalation in complexity of consumer electronic devices, people increasingly find themselves faced with a formidable challenge every time that they want to change their TV channels. We describe a system that solves this problem in a very creative fashion. It allows people to control their TV sets by throwing objects against them. We developed an infrastructure based on an object recognition system that permits us to relate real physical objects with different kinds of video programming. In terms of future work, we are investigating the possibility of applying the concepts behind ImpactTV to other types of media such as audio and the World Wide Web.

ImpactTV: Controlling Media with Physical Objects (5 pages, 400 KB)