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Abstract
Existing tracking methods designed for interacting with projection-based displays generally require visible artifacts to be introduced in the environment in order to guarantee effective stability and accuracy. For instance, in optical-oriented approaches, either the camera sensor or the reference pattern used for tracking are often located within the user's sight (or interfere with it), thus occluding portions of the scene or altering the perception of the virtual environment. Several ways to tackle these issues have been recently explored. Proposed approaches basically aim at making the presence of tracking references in the virtual space transparent to the user. However, such solutions introduce possibly critical constraints on required hardware or environment configuration. In this work, a novel tracking approach based on imperceptible fiducial markers is proposed. The approach relies on a hiding technique that allows digital images to be embedded in (and retrieved from) a projected scene by exploiting the properties of light polarization and additive color mixing. In particular, the virtual scene is obtained by overlapping the light beams of two projectors and by dealing with markers’ hiding via color compensation. A prototype setup has been deployed, where interaction with a flat surface projection environment has been evaluated in terms of tracking accuracy and artifacts avoidance performance by using a consumer camera equipped with a polarizing filter. Although the performed tests presented in this article represent only a preliminary and a partial evaluation of the proposed approach, they provided encouraging results indicating that the proposed technique could be possibly applied in more complex interaction scenarios still with limited hardware requirements.