iCam: Precise at-a-Distance Interaction in the Physical Environment

Precise indoor localization is quickly becoming a reality, but application demonstrations to date have been limited to use of only a single piece of location information attached to an individual sensing device. The localized device is often held by an individual, allowing applications, often unreliably, to make high-level predictions of user intent based solely on that single piece of location information. In this paper, we demonstrate how effective integration of sensing and laser-assisted interaction results in a handheld device, the iCam, which simultaneously calculates its own location as well as the location of another object in the environment. We describe how iCam is built and demonstrate how location-aware at-a-distance interaction simplifies certain location-aware activities.