The Best Way to Navigate Your Comic Collection

January 24th, 2008 by: Technabob

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Why dig through stacks and stacks of individual comic books when you can quickly find the exact one you’re looking for using a wall-sized über-cool Minority Report-like user interface?

A project developed by Daniel Stødle and a team of PhD students from Norway’s University of Tromsø, this huge display wall can detect gestures to navigate through a catalog of over 3 years worth of comic strips, quickly jumping to any individual strip in seconds.

The enormous display is comprised of a grid of 28 synchronized video projectors, forming a whopping 7168 x 3072 display resolution (that’s over 22 megapixels). A system of 16 cameras and 9 computers detect and process user movements. Using hand gestures like those used on the iPhone, you can scale, rotate, pan and tilt across the collection almost instantaneously. A simple double-snap of your fingers makes the display zoom in an extra level of depth to the location where you snapped, while a single snap zooms back out.

Of course, the interface isn’t just designed for navigating comic strips, but is a proof of concept for using large scale displays and gesture recognition to navigate huge numbers of visual assets quickly. Very cool stuff indeed.