Projection-Based Body Augmentation System on Smart Wheelchair

The hand plays an important role in the non-verbal human-human communication. For example, “pointing” is the simplest and the strongest means to convey an intention or a target to a colocated partner. On the other hand, “pointing” has a disadvantage that the target becomes ambiguous if it is at a distance. In the case of wheelchair users, because they have a narrow hand reach and are difficult to move freely, they always face difficulties in their communications. Therefore we propose a smart wheelchair system on which a battery-powered mobile projector is mounted. The projector superimposes a virtual hand image extended from the actual hand, and a user manipulates it as an extension of the real hand in order to interact with distant targets. In addition, we investigate the desirable settings with regard to the scale and orientation of the projected virtual hand.