YOU can now play noughts and crosses with an opponent on the other side of
the world鈥攚ith only pen and paper. Just draw a grid and make your move.
Tele-Graffiti does the rest, transmitting your move over the Internet and
projecting it onto your oppenent鈥檚 paper.
Tele-Graffiti, invented at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, consists
of a digital camera and a high-resolution projector. As you sketch your design,
the camera captures your doodling and transmits the digitised image to the other
Tele-Graffiti, where the projector casts the image onto a blank sheet of paper.
The image is so sharp it looks as though it has been drawn on the paper on your
desk.
The Carnegie Mellon team presented the Tele-Graffiti at the International
Conference on Computer Vision in Vancouver, British Columbia, this week. 鈥淭he
idea was to design a system that is as easy to use as a pad and pencil,鈥� says
Jianbo Shi, who worked on the device along with Simon Baker and Naoya Takao. The
team hopes eventually to shrink the system to the size of a desk lamp.
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One great advantage of Tele-Graffiti is that it tracks the sheet of paper
that you are working on and ignores the rest of your desktop clutter such as
coffee cups. The camera scans the desk for a white rectangle with four long
edges roughly perpendicular to each other. Any time you move the paper, the
camera follows it and changes the angle of the projector.
Tele-Graffiti can be used by two or more people. The delay in sending an
image from one site to another over a local network is 70 milliseconds
As well as making long-distance paper games possible, the researchers say the
Tele-Graffiti will have serious applications. For example, it will enable teams
of architects to work on designs simultaneously, without having to be in the
same office, or even the same country.
