Through the looking glass is a system that allows a person to play a game with her/himself in a mirror. A full-body-action pong game can be played with the current installation, which provides the excitement of wining and losing at the same time, against oneself. [video]

[conceptual overview; illustration by cami dodson]

   
[the system at work – the winner and the loser are both you]

Lumisty Film, which is used as the material for the table surface, is a key to enabling this unique gaming experience. Lumisty Film selectively diffuses light based on projection angles, which can be used to implement an LCD projection screen that can only be viewed from a person who is looking straight into an LCD projector. (This technology is used for an interactive table system called Lumisight Table, which was developed by the same group at the University of Tokyo.)

So, using two projectors and a mirror as shown in the following illustration, images from one projector can only be seen in the mirror while images form the other projector cannot be seen in the mirror. The camera tracks the location of the disk that the player manipulates on the table.

[hardware configuration]

Additional video clips: [Digista, IIA2004]

References:
Kakehi, Y. & Naemura, T. (2004) through the looking glass. In: The Journal of the Society for Art and Science, 3(3), 185-188. (in Japanese)

Minomo, M. Kakehi, Y., Iida, M. & Naemura, T. (2005) Transforming Your Shadow into Colorful Visual Media — Multi-Projection of Complementary Colors, ACM SIGCHI Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology (ACE2005), 61-68, Valencia, June 2005.

via Digital Stadium