The augmented table is a project I did on a rainy sunday in my small apartment in fynsgade. I was interested in playing with a mixed reality setup, and chose my legendary teenage table as the basis of a future work bench.

With a fixed DV-cam I recorded the short session of me gesturing on the table, grabbed the footage and imported it into 3Dstudio where I matched the camera. By a quick measurement of the table, I could model a virtual table and overlay this on the videostream.

By frame-by-frame tracking of my finger path-deform animations were used to create the splines on the table, that later are extruded to virtual displays. The proces is simple, boring and a bit time consuming, but it is not that bad and the result is ok!

Using matte shaders I played with a tiny reflection and shadow in the table even though it was a grey and rainy day. This trick helps locating the displays to the table, as well as the opacity of the displays increases the impression of the two worlds merging.

See the video here (6mb)