LightSense: enabling spatially aware handheld interaction devices

The vision of spatially aware handheld interaction devices has been hard to realize. The difficulties in solving the general tracking problem for small devices have been addressed by several research groups and examples of issues are performance, hardware availability and platform independency. We present LightSense, an approach that employs commercially available components to achieve robust tracking of cell phone LEDs, without any modifications to the device. Cell phones can thus be promoted to interaction and display devices in ubiquitous installations of systems such as the ones we present here. This could enable a new generation of spatially aware handheld interaction devices that would unobtrusively empower and assist us in our everyday tasks.