Finger tracking for the Digital Desk

One trend in computing environments today is to move towards more 'natural' interaction. Another is to make hardware invisible to the user. Both these ideas converge into ubiquitous computing-the Digital Desk is an example of this idea. In this paper, we concentrate on an input device for the Digital Desk, namely the user's fingertip, which is made to act like a mouse. Tracking such an input device is common to a number of augmented reality environments and involves vision and motion analysis. However, previous attempts have focused more on the vision aspect of tracking general objects than on using the information already known about the user's hand, which is the approach taken in this paper. We adopted the goal of tracking the user's fingertips as fast as possible in real time, so that the system could be compared with other input devices by using models such as Fitts' law. Our system is shown to comply with the law adequately.