SBIR Phase I: Long-distance, robust and unobtrusive visual tags for proximal interaction with public display infrastructure

该项目更广泛的影响/商业潜力是极大地改变人们与物理环境交互和从物理环境中获取信息的方式。随着信息显示器和移动的设备的不断增加，它们提供了对不断增加的信息量的访问。然而，受限于其狭窄的输入和输出接口，个人设备无意中将其用户与其周围环境隔离，而是将其注意力集中在云中的数字内容上。自然和毫不费力的互动可以重新连接我们的物理世界。实现无缝的公私通信有可能彻底改变物理显示媒体，户外广告和公共标志。它可以生成新的交互式体验，这些体验对用户来说既沉浸又个性化，从而将第二屏幕应用带到专用空间之外，例如客厅或飞机座椅。此外，它可以将数字内容交付从蜂窝网络转移到更细粒度的邻近网络。展望未来，随着可穿戴摄像头设备的出现，这种技术可以成为本地上下文和意图信息的主要来源，从而将用户从手动或语音输入的任务中解放出来。它将成为信息服务从？请求？更强大的？建议？这个小型企业创新研究第一阶段项目将开发视觉标签，可以从远处扫描，同时保持视觉上不显眼。视觉条形码具有小尺寸、大解码距离和鲁棒性。所提出的技术通过重新评估使用场景的特征并从根本上重新组织对象-扫描仪关系来克服这种权衡。这项研究将导致一个实际的系统设计，将相当大的复杂性从扫描仪转移到基础设施。由于复杂度较低，视觉标签可以快速、稳健地解码，并且距离超出2D条形码的范围。此外，通过利用一种新的时空显示技术，称为VRCodes，所提出的视觉标签基本上是不可感知的。这项研究将推动这项技术使用没有专用的视觉真实的房地产。这项工作的一个附带成果是更好地理解有多少信息可以通过可见光通道传输而不为最终观众所知。

The broader impact/commercial potential of this project is to dramatically transform the way people interact with and take information away from their physical environments. As information displays and mobile devices continue to multiply, they give access to ever increasing amounts of information. However, limited by their narrow input and output interfaces, personal devices inadvertently isolate their users from their immediate surroundings, instead focusing their attention toward the digital content in the cloud. Natural and effortless interaction could reconnect us to the physical world. Enabling seamless public-private communication has the potential to revolutionize physical display media, outdoor advertising, and public signage. It can generate new interactive experiences which are both immersive and personalized to the user bringing second screen applications beyond dedicated space, such as living room or airplane seat. Furthermore, it can shift digital content delivery from cellular networks to much more granular proximal networks. Going forward, in the advent of wearable camera-enabled devices, such technology can become the primary source of local context and intent information, relieving the user from the task of manual or vocal input. It will become the essential stepping stone as information services move from ?request? to a more powerful ?suggest? mode.This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will develop visual tags which can be scanned from afar while remaining visually unobtrusive. Visual barcodes trade small size, large decoding distance, and robustness. The proposed technology overcomes this trade-off by re-evaluating the characteristics of the usage scenario and fundamentally reorganizing the object-scanner relationship. This research will result in a practical system design which shifts considerable complexity from the scanner to the infrastructure. With lower complexity, the visual tags can be decoded quickly, robustly, and at distances beyond the reach of 2D barcodes. Additionally, by leveraging a novel spatio-temporal display technique, called VRCodes, the proposed visual tags are essentially imperceptible. This research will advance this technique to use no dedicated visual real estate. A side outcome of this work is a better understanding for how much information can be transmitted through the visible light channel unbeknownst to the end viewer.