Type of Publication: Article in Collected Edition

Exploiting thermal reflection for interactive systems

Author(s):

Shirazi, Alireza Sahami; Abdelrahman, Yomna; Henze, Niels; Schneegass, Stefan; Khalilbeigi, Mohammadreza; ; Schmidt, Albrecht

Title of Anthology:

Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '14)

pages:

3483-3492

Publisher:

ACM

Location(s):

New York, USA

Publication Date:

2014

ISBN:

978-1-4503-2473-1

Digital Object Identifier (DOI):

doi:10.1145/2556288.2557208

Citation:

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Abstract

Thermal cameras have recently drawn the attention of HCI researchers as a new sensory system enabling novel interactive systems. They are robust to illumination changes and make it easy to separate human bodies from the image background. Far-infrared radiation, however, has another characteristic that distinguishes thermal cameras from their RGB or depth counterparts, namely thermal reflection. Common surfaces reflect thermal radiation differently than visual light and can be perfect thermal mirrors. In this paper, we show that through thermal reflection, thermal cameras can sense the space beyond their direct field-of-view. A thermal camera can sense areas besides and even behind its field-of-view through thermal reflection. We investigate how thermal reflection can increase the interaction space of projected surfaces using camera-projection systems. We moreover discuss the reflection characteristics of common surfaces in our vicinity in both the visual and thermal radiation bands. Using a proof-of-concept prototype, we demonstrate the increased interaction space for hand-held camera-projection system. Furthermore, we depict a number of promising application examples that can benefit from the thermal reflection characteristics of surfaces.