Changing the Appearance of Real-World Objects By Modifying Their Surroundings

We present an approach to alter the perceived appearance of physical objects by controlling their surrounding space. Many real-world objects cannot easily be equipped with displays or actuators in order to change their shape. While common approaches such as projection mapping enable changing the appearance of objects without modifying them, certain surface properties (e.g. highly reflective or transparent surfaces) can make employing these techniques difficult. In this work, we present a conceptual design exploration on how the appearance of an object can be changed by solely altering the space around it, rather than the object itself. In a proof-of-concept implementation, we place objects onto a tabletop display and track them together with users to display perspective-corrected 3D graphics for augmentation. This enables controlling properties such as the perceived size, color, or shape of objects. We characterize the design space of our approach and demonstrate potential applications. For example, we change the contour of a wallet to notify users when their bank account is debited. We envision our approach to gain in importance with increasing ubiquity of display surfaces.

@inbook{Lindlbauer2017, 
 author = {Lindlbauer, David and Mueller, J"{o}rg and Alexa, Marc}, 
 title = {Changing the Appearance of Real-World Objects By Modifying Their Surroundings}, 
 year = {2017}, 
 isbn = {9781450346559}, 
 publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery}, 
 address = {New York, NY, USA}, 
 url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025795}, 
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems}, 
 pages = {3954–3965}, 
 numpages = {12} 
 }