LightBeam: interacting with augmented real-world objects in pico projections

Pico projectors have lately been investigated as mobile display and interaction devices. We propose to use them as 'light beams': Everyday objects sojourning in a beam are turned into dedicated projection surfaces and tangible interaction devices. This way, our daily surroundings get populated with interactive objects, each one temporarily chartered with a dedicated sub-issue of pervasive interaction. While interaction with objects has been studied in larger, immersive projection spaces, the affordances of pico projections are fundamentally different: they have a very small, strictly limited field of projection, and they are mobile. This paper contributes the results of an exploratory field study on how people interact with everyday objects in pico projections in nomadic settings. Based upon these results, we present novel interaction techniques that leverage the limited field of projection and trade-off between digitally augmented and traditional uses of everyday objects.