Using Multiple Kinects to Build Larger Multi-Surface Environments

Multi-surface environments integrate a wide variety of different devices such as mobile phones, tablets, digital tabletops and large wall displays into a single interactive environment. The interactions in these environments are extremely diverse and should utilize the spatial layout of the room, capabilities of the device, or both. For practical multi-surface environments, using low-cost instrumentation is essential to reduce entry barriers. When building multi-surface environments and interactions based on lower-end tracking systems (such as the Microsoft Kinect) as opposed to higher-end tracking systems (such as the Vicon Motion Tracking systems), both developer and hardware issues emerge. Issues such as time and ease to build a multi-surface environment, limited range of lowcost tracking systems, are reasons we created MSE-API. In this paper, we present MSE-API, its flexibility with low-cost tracking systems, and industry-based usage scenarios.