A practical system for laser pointer interaction on large displays

Abstract

Much work has been done on the development of laser pointers as interaction devices. Typically a camera captures images of a display surface and extracts a laser pointer dot location. This location is processed and used as a cursor position. While the current literature well explains such a system, we feel that some important practical concerns have gone unaddressed. We discuss the design of such a tracking system, focusing on key practical implementation details. In particular we present a robust and efficient dot detection algorithm that allows us to use our system under a variety lighting conditions, and allows us to reduce the amount of image parsing required to find a laser position by an order of magnitude.