Table of Contents

IK0603 Tele-table

Introduction

Overview of the system:

In this project, we are going to produce a multipurpose table that can be used to play many types of games such as board games (Chinese chess), card games (UNO), interactive games (air hockey, snooker). You can even use it to give personal tutorial or presentation to the others. The system is consisted of two to six tables and each table is shown in the following diagram:

One set of table is made of a plasma TV placed horizontally and a web camera hung above the plasma TV. The other sets of tables are placed remotely. For example, one set is placed at my home and the other set is placed at your home.

When we place an object on the table, then this object will be displayed on the other tables as well. If we move the objects on the table by your hands, the other players will also see that you are using your hands to move your objects on their tables. We will also use one more monitor, web camera and microphone to display the real time video of the other players and transmit the voice to the other players. This is shown in the following diagram:

Nowadays, the eye-toys can just capture the player’s body movement to control the objects rendered by computer graphics. The players may simply hold their hands in the air to control the virtual objects (Have you seen a player holding his hands in the air to play weight lifting without the mass?), but it looks silly.

The significance of this system are:

  1. We can use real objects to play games remotely (For UNO card game, we use real UNO cards. For air hockey, we use real handle.)
  2. There is no such system in the market yet, so the potential in the market is high.
  3. This system can provide the players with a real experience that you can use real objects to interact with the other players remotely. This experience is excellent.

If we further develop it, write a game engine on it, we can even play air hockey or UNO or other games. Moreover, we can even use it to give personal tutorial or presentation to the others.

For more information, please read the following proposal: Proposal

Important Topics

  1. Networking
    1. Johnnie's Winsock Tutorial
    2. Windows Sockets Network Programming
    3. A Distributed Multiplayer Game Server System PDF
  2. Direct X (DirectShow)programming
    1. MSDN DirectShow
    2. COM programming
    3. Callback loop in Windows Application Framework
    4. Discuss on BaseClass Source Code
    5. DirectShow tutorial by Dr. Ruigang Yang in University of Kentuchy
    6. C++ Tutorial by the C++ resource network
  3. Graphical User Interface
  4. Image Processing
    1. Key extraction by image differentiation,Mitsunaga, T.; Yokoyama,T.;Totsuka, T.;Image Processing, 1995. Proceedings., International Conference onVolume 2, 23-26 Oct. 1995 Page(s):248 - 251 vol.2 Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/ICIP.1995.537461PDF
    2. Object recognition from local scale-invariant features,Lowe, D.G.;Computer Vision, 1999. The Proceedings of the Seventh IEEE International Conference on Volume 2, 20-27 Sept. 1999 Page(s):1150 - 1157 vol.2 Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/ICCV.1999.790410 PDF
    3. Software Chroma Keying in an Immersive Virtual Environment
    4. A level-set approach to image blending,Whitaker, R.T. Sch. of Comput., Utah Univ., Salt Lake City, UT ;PDF
    5. A Variational Approach to Blending Based on Warping for Non-Overlapped Images
    6. OpenCV
      1. Introduction to programming with OpenCV
      2. CV Reference Manual
  1. Tele-something
    1. Telegame: a new type of teleoperation, Liu Jingtai; Chen Tao; Sun Lei; Wu Shuihua; Huang Xingbo; Zhao Chunying; Intelligent Control and Automation, 2004. WCICA 2004. Fifth World Congress on Volume 6, 15-19 June 2004 Page(s):4741 - 4744 Vol.6 PDF
    2. Telegame2:Intemet-based telegame - Intelligent Control and Automation -Architecture of TTRP facing the Internet-based telegame. This work is partially supported by 863 Hi-tech Research -Robotic Architecture far lntemet Based Telegame. quotes the event-based liked control. designed as. Figure 1. …PDF

Search for papers

  1. IEEE Xplore
  2. ACM PORTAL

Important Conferences

  1. IEEE Multimedia Expo (ICME) [ 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 ]

Current achievement

  1. Demostration
  2. Mid-report
  3. Presentation(ppt)

Schedule

In the first semester, we have developed the basic part of our system. For details of what we have done, please read our report. The following is our schedule in this semester (2007):

Week1 Scheduling
Week2 Developing an algorithm to remove small connected components and noise
Week3 Developing an algorithm to remove small connected components and noise
Week4 Wrapping (Map a pixel on the screen to a pixel inside the camera buffer)
Week5 Wrapping (Map a pixel on the screen to a pixel inside the camera buffer)
Week6 Wrapping (Map a pixel on the screen to a pixel inside the camera buffer)
Week7 Implementation of the AR system module
Week8 Implementation of the AR system module
Week9 Fine tuning
Week10 Documentation
Week11 Documentation
Week12 Documentation

Things done in this semester

  1. count area and remove small connected components by 4-way resursive method (stack overflow sometimes)
  2. count area and remove remove small connected components by 4-way stack method (using own-defined stack, good result but slow)
  3. count area of connected components by scanline method scanline method(fastest)
  4. Better mapping method between display buffer and capture buffer
    1. A black and white chessboard with 160 corners (inner and outer) are used as tiepoints
    2. Microsoft Direct3D is used to do texture mapping and interpolation
    3. This method result in more accurate position