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Games

AquaTop Turns Your Bathtub Into A Touchscreen Display

The AquaTop Display turns a bath into an interactive and immersive surface.

The struggle to not get your book wet while in the bathtub has gotten even more problematic in our digital world of smartphones and tablets. Now instead of worrying about a soggy book, bathers are trying not to to ruin their electronics.

Japanese researchers came up with a solution at the University of Electro-CommunicationsKoike Lab in Tokyo.

The AquaTop Display allows users to leave their electronics on the shelf and turn their bath into an interactive and immersive surface. Using a Microsoft Kinect Depth camera, opaque bathwater, a projector, and a PC, the team has created a natural user interface.

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The way the AquaTop works is that by adding bath salts to bathwater, it becomes opaque allowing the water to act as a surface to show projections. With the use of the Kinect camera, “fingers that are protruding out from underneath the water or floating on the water surface can be distinguished from one another based on region, area, and shape.”

The infrared light from the Kinect camera tracks movement around the surface of the water. Both the camera and the projector are hooked up to a single PC that connects the two.

A user playing a game on the AquaTop Display

This “touchscreen for your bathtub” is able to perform functions just like any other device. Users can zoom in using two fingers, as well as drag and drop by scooping up water with their hands.

The game mode allows users to float their hands above the surface to create a beam of light or put their palms together to create a ball of light that will then produce an even bigger ball of light. A waterproof speaker system can also be added for another dimension to the game.

Beyond creating a new and exciting way to bathe, the AquaTop aims to break down the barrier of a screen. It tries to create a more intuitive gaming experience, where users can control things in a more comprehensive and physical manner.

When users want to close out an app, they can simply pull it into the water and make it disappear. This type of immersive interaction lets people reconnect with an intrinsic physicality that can sometimes be lost in technology. Dragging something on a touch screen surface is much different to feeling the water move as your hand drags that same app across a tub.

While the AquaTop Display is still just a prototype, it’s exciting to think that soon enough we might be able to use other natural surfaces as  touchscreens.

[via Nerdcore]

All images courtesy of The University of Electo-Communications Koike Labratory 

@Sintrator11