Research
Information has never before been as important to us as nowadays: we carry along many devices which help us to connect to internet and keep us up to date to what is going on in the world and to communicate with ohters. In Japan, taking bath is very popular among people and they even started installing TV-s and other media devices in the bathroom in order to keep up with what is going on in the world. Holding a remote control in the bath or taking your phone inside the bath is complicated and even dangerous and you can easily ruin the device. This is the basis for idea for using the water in the bath as a screen and your hands as controllers. In this abstract, we propose the intuitive interaction technique and information display techniques that can be used during bathing. A feature of this system is the input using the unique characteristics of fluids. We suggest three gestures which use features of water, such as poking finger out from water surface, stroking water surface and scooping up water. Hardware construction of our system is consists of a Microsoft Kinect depth camera for finger recognition, a projector for image projection and PC for processing. We use cloudy water made from bath salts for the water screen. It is reasonable to consider the cloudiness of water in a bathing situation from soaps, etc. Given the expectations of a standard bathing environment, the surface of the bath is wide and allowed for a large screen for information presentation. The bathroom lighting should also be sufficient for visibility. Usage scenario consists of a person sitting in the bath and screen projected in front of him on water. Modification of the projection image is also applied before the projection. In this system, we apply a fluid simulation to the information to warp the image such that it appears to be floating on water. The reason for this is that when interaction is applied to the waters surface, the surface shape changes dynamically, thus making the information move in a similar fashion will bring about a more natural impact. The expected results of this system are to create useful applications for the liquid display system that take advantages of the unique things that water offers us. One option is to create an application which flatters kids to take a bath: a task which otherwise often is not liked by them. Systems using that kind of technique have not made before so results got from this project can be also used as basis for the next ones. In this paper a new and interactive way for controlling media in bathroom was suggested to satisfy the on growing need for information in modern world.