Creating 3D Projection on Tangible Objects In the future we will focus on enabling functional interactions and automatic projector calibrations to make projections more useful and interesting e.g. for teaching purposes

ROTATING GLOBE DEMONSTRATOR Projected multimedia installations or learning material are part of everyday life in museums, exhibitions and schools. Earlier research has introduced relatively much work on projection systems, where images are shown on arbitrary surfaces, see e.g. In the demonstration described in this paper we use non-planar surface, a sphere shaped object and project a visualization of rotating Earth on it. Earlier research has experimented with sphere shaped interactive displays. At Microsoft, Benko et al. built and experimented with a spherical multi touch screen Sphere [3], and in [4], a spherical volumetric display with touch input is described. Our demonstration does not currently have input functionality, but it is considered as the potential direction for future work. Bimber and Raskar [5] presents techniques involving both hardware and software to implement spatial augmented reality (SAR) installations. This demonstration presents a tangible 3D projection that we aim to develop and use for exhibition and teaching purposes. In our demonstration we used a sphere shaped object and projected a visualization of rotating Earth on it. Our 3D setup contains five projectors, four in the sides of the projection surface and one is at the top of the surface as seen in figure 1. All projectors are 4 feet away from the sphere and the whole set-up takes 10 x 10 feet space. Four of the projectors are at 90-degree angles from each other surrounding the sphere and one projector is mounted 4 feet above the sphere. * e-mail: [email protected] The simulation in the virtual 3D world contains five cameras according the physical world setup, and each camera represents a projector. The virtual 3D world contains a 3D model of the sphere, which has textures from satellite images. It animates clouds as well as the change of the night and day as seen in figure 2. Our setup is made using open source libraries such as Open Scene Graph and Projection Designer. We have done a study where we compared two different set-ups, one presented animated earth projected on a 2D display and another one was our 3D projection of earth [6]. The results show that the 3D installation was found more interesting and engaging than 2D presentation. The results were encouraging, and we will continue our work with the subject