Digitally ASSISTED BILLIARDS

By justin Needham and Matthew Straub

The limiting factor of our implementation was hardware. Unfortunately, projectors and web cameras with adequate wide angle lenses are priced outside of our means, and as such, we found that we needed to use key-stoning algorithms to correct for the fact that the camera was located in the corner of the room, rather than above the pool table, and had to use a very large mirror mounted to the ceiling to allow enough room for the projector to display on the whole table. The mirror introduced further issue insomuch as a mirror, glued to a large piece of plywood and hung upside down does not tend to be flat. And as a result, we had to account for those distortions in our code as well.

It’s also worth noting that the code was designed using Microsoft Visual studio 2005  as an embedded OS project for an e-Box 2300.

Overall, however, we were pleased with the results:

Given the time and money, there are a lot of things that we would like to improve with Digitally Assisted Billiards.

First, higher resolution and wider angle cameras and projectors would greatly increase our accuracy, as well as the playable areas of the table.

Second, because this is more of a proof of concept than a final product, there is about a page of #define statements that would be good to abstract into 1) auto detected values, and 2) an LCD GUI to adjust some of the more particular variables.

This project was a design project for our ECE 4180 “Embedded Systems” class. As such, we would like to thank our Professor Jim Hamblen for his support, as well as our TA David Colvin.

Also, we would like to thank Anthony Brock for the use of his projector, Christopher Erdman for his assistance with mounting the mirror, and Robert Thackston for his part in our video.

Furthermore, we would like to thank Phi Kappa Theta for allowing us to take over the pool room for almost 2 weeks.