SBIR Phase I: Long-distance, robust and unobtrusive visual tags for proximal interaction with public display infrastructure

The broader impact/commercial potential of this project is to dramatically transform the way people interact with and take information away from their physical environments. As information displays and mobile devices continue to multiply, they give access to ever increasing amounts of information. However, limited by their narrow input and output interfaces, personal devices inadvertently isolate their users from their immediate surroundings, instead focusing their attention toward the digital content in the cloud. Natural and effortless interaction could reconnect us to the physical world. Enabling seamless public-private communication has the potential to revolutionize physical display media, outdoor advertising, and public signage. It can generate new interactive experiences which are both immersive and personalized to the user bringing second screen applications beyond dedicated space, such as living room or airplane seat. Furthermore, it can shift digital content delivery from cellular networks to much more granular proximal networks. Going forward, in the advent of wearable camera-enabled devices, such technology can become the primary source of local context and intent information, relieving the user from the task of manual or vocal input. It will become the essential stepping stone as information services move from ?request? to a more powerful ?suggest? mode. This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will develop visual tags which can be scanned from afar while remaining visually unobtrusive. Visual barcodes trade small size, large decoding distance, and robustness. The proposed technology overcomes this trade-off by re-evaluating the characteristics of the usage scenario and fundamentally reorganizing the object-scanner relationship. This research will result in a practical system design which shifts considerable complexity from the scanner to the infrastructure. With lower complexity, the visual tags can be decoded quickly, robustly, and at distances beyond the reach of 2D barcodes. Additionally, by leveraging a novel spatio-temporal display technique, called VRCodes, the proposed visual tags are essentially imperceptible. This research will advance this technique to use no dedicated visual real estate. A side outcome of this work is a better understanding for how much information can be transmitted through the visible light channel unbeknownst to the end viewer.