Projector and camera group

We in the projector group (Elias, Jimmy, John, Nicklas, Patrik) have started tossing around a few ideas for our part of the project. Not much is decided yet, but this is what we know for certain:

We're going to create a system which allows you to share your physical workspace with other people over the Internet, using a camera and projector. Our first version of the program will allow two users at a time; we'll call them person A and person B.

When person A uses our system, a camera mounted above her workspace films her desk and streams the video data (or interesting parts of it) to person B. Person B has a similar setup, which sends data to person A.

Using a projector, person A's physical desk is augmented with the digital data received from person B, and vice versa. Each participant will be able to see (parts) of the other person's desk projected on their own, creating the illusion of having one shared workspace.

What we have yet to decide is exactly what information should be sent, and how it will be displayed. Our target group is mainly architects, who will be using the system to collaborate on drawings while working in different locations (of course, there are more possible uses for such a system).

In the above image, you can see a sketch of our first idea for an implementation: We thought of separating the area of a user's workspace that is being filmed from the one where received information is displayed. However, we decided against this idea, since what we're really after is giving the users the illusion of working in the same place. This means, for example, that users should be able to draw on the same piece of paper.

For now, we'll play around with different Java libraries for a while and try to find out what we can actually do. We'll post some info on our new ideas soon!