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Andreas Butz, Antonio Krüger
A mixed reality room following the generalized peephole metaphor
In IEEE Computer Graphics & Applications, IEEE press, ISSN 0272-1716, Los Alamitos, CA, USA, 2006

We present the generalized peephole metaphor, a model of interaction for ubiquitous computing and instrumented environments. The metaphor provides a way of organizing and structuring ubiquitous in- and output facilities in instrumented environments consisting of several distributed but coordinated sensors and displays. Its main idea is to look at the environment as one large display and sensor continuum, in which peepholes provide localized and user-specific windows between the physical environment and a virtual information layer. The metaphor nicely matches models of human perception, for example the fact that humans make use of external representation in their environments and access information by guiding their attention to specific locations. We then present a specific MR room and show how a number of in- and output activities can be described in terms of the peephole metaphor. We discuss how the metaphor can cope with scalability and access control and how it supports a family of interaction styles and pre- sentation methods in instrumented environments. We analyze the technological requirements for implementing the peephole metaphor and show that it works very well with the limited hardware already available today, such as projector-camera units, wall-mounted displays and portable screens. Looking beyond today's technological limitations, we argue that peepholes will be a particularly helpful metaphor for structuring interaction with hardware which might be available in the future, such as room-covering interactive displays in the form of e-ink wallpapers and ubiquitous gesture recognition.