Interactive Sand Table

About

Interactive Sand Table Prototype

AtmoSPHERE is an interactive zen garden that tracks human movement using a Microsoft Kinect and simple computer vision algorithms and represents this movement via unique, tranquil sand trace visualizations

We introduce AtmoSPHERE, a new method for automatically imbuing a sand table--or interactive zen garden--with properties of its surrounding space and occupants. AtmoSPHERE uses a Microsoft Kinect to monitor and extract movement in a room and then visualizes representations of this movement physically via sand traces on a custom built XY servo sandbox table. We present our prototype system, the design process and interaction modes, feedback from a preliminary deployment, and a discussion of future work.

We were quite excited to see a commercialization of this idea: Bruce Shapiro's "Kinectic Art Table", which received a pledge of nearly $2m on Kickstarter. More here