Earlier this year we built a live depth estimation system in our research lab. It uses a small laser projector with visible light and an event camera to estimate the depth of the projected points. You get a point cloud of whatever surface or object you’re projecting on, while being free to project any content [0]. Also it’s fast enough to process 1280x720 points at 60 Hz with a laptop CPU.
Explaining this work and use cases can sometimes be a bit of a struggle. Maybe if “ambient computing” is established as a widely known buzzword, imma have to steal it to make that part of the job a little easier. Until now I was mostly going with mixed reality.