Lumipen is the projection mapping system developed by the Ishikawa Oku Laboratory at the University of Tokyo. It can track moving objects and it keeps them in the center of the screen continuously. Also, this mechatronic camera system can project images onto a moving object.
Lumipen is a system based on the optical high-speed gaze controller - Saccade Mirror. Saccade Mirror is composed of two important parts:
- two galvanometer mirrors,
- pupil shift lenses.
The projector, camera and lenses are fixed. The pan/tilt mirrors are mounted on a rotational base with two-axis actuators and they control the camera's gaze optically. For millisecond-order control, the weight of the rotating parts must be reduced as much as possible.
Using a rotating mirror is a common method, but usually, the mirror is in front of the camera, so a very large mirror is needed. But a feature of this system is, it can even capture wide-angle images with a small mirror. That's because the system contains special optics called a pupil shift system.
This system does very fast image processing to recognize the subject. It captures and processes an image every 1/1000th of a second. General principle of operation is shown in the following videos.
Research papers:
Kohei Okumura, Hiromasa Oku, Masatoshi Ishikawa: High-speed Gaze Controller for Millisecond-order Pan/tilt Camera, 2011 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation. Link.
Kohei Okumura, Hiromasa Oku, Masatoshi Ishikawa: Lumipen: Projection-based mixed reality for dynamic objects, 2012 IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo. Link.
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