The Smart Workplace provides a means to share paper documents between remote desktops, interact with documents and request services (such as translation), and communicate with a remote person through a teleconference. It was made possible by combining advances in camera/projector technology that enable a fully functional digital desk, embodied telepresence in video conferencing and concept art that imagines future workstyles.

By providing high-quality capture of paper documents on a tabletop, the document images can be shared remotely, and the contents can be extracted with OCR for language translation and search services. Using a high resolution video camera and applying computer vision algorithms, we have developed a system to detect document pages on a cluttered tabletop and capture perspective-corrected full page images at sufficient resolution for OCR.

By augmenting the desktop surface with projected widgets, users can interact with the system along with the paper documents in a more natural way than with traditional keyboard & mouse devices. We have developed a projector-camera system with gesture based widgets. An example application is a toolbar for controlling the document capture service, performing OCR, doing translation, and initiating a teleconference.

Another useful application is searching for related documents and people. Using document analysis techniques such as topic modeling, we have developed visualizations to find relevant documents and people, and these can be projected onto the smart desk in the context of active reading.