The Self-Organizing Desk

Abstract

The self-organizing desk is a system that enhances a physical desk-top with electronic information. It can remember, organize, update, and manipulate the information contained in the documents on a desk. The system consists of a simple robot eye that can survey the desk, a module for smart extraction of information from the images taken by the robot, a module for representing this information in multiple views, and a module that allows a user to interact with this information. 1 Introduction We wish to create smart physical worlds, that can augment reality with electronic information. Such spaces will keep track of their own contents, indexing and organizing their objects in electronic views. We hope to achieve this vision by using sensors to extract information about the physical world. The self-organizing desk, a system that can keep track of its contents autonomously, is an example of such systems. Consider the flow of paper that arrives for processing at someone's desk. Many pap...