What if screens are all around us, sensing our every move? Hasso Platner Institute and Microsoft Research answered that question with this cool yet creepy "smart floor" called GravitySpace:
Through a series of research projects, they’ve developed a smart floor (called Multitoe) that can sense, identify, and distinguish the presence of individual people and furniture. Then, using software and a projector placed well beneath a glass floor (called GravitySpace), they can extend the real world into a sort of subterranean digital shadow. [...]
The floor itself uses a technology called FTIR, a network of invisible, IR-based light sensors that can measure the footprints of any physical entity. It’s so sensitive that software can actually extrapolate pressure information, which can imply the movements and poses of the human bodies standing on it. As for those digital shadows themselves, the models do have to be built ahead of time, but all of the movement animations are being rendered in real time. So several different people can automatically have their pre-built avatars sucked from a library when they walk into a room, and the experience is seamless.
Mark Wilson of Co.DESIGN has the post: Link