Staring out of the train at the landscape that whizzes by could be about to become a lot more interactive, if Japanese audiovisual collective Salad has its way.

For its project "Touch the Train Window" the team has used an iPhone, an Xbox 360 Kinect, a projector, a GPS sensor, and a stack of openFrameworks code to create a train window that allows users to place objects on the vistas in front of them in real time, thanks to Augmented Reality.

In this example, users are able to add hot-air ballons and animations to the landscape as they hurtle through it. 

The size and depth of an object are judged automatically on where the window is touched. 

Touch the train window ! from SALAD a.k.a. PARTICLE AT REST on Vimeo.

 

As you can see from the video, the system allows you to make boring scenery much more exciting and of course opens up the possibility to perhaps deliver much more information in the future.

Here at Pocket-lint we can easily see a system like this providing travellers with information on the cityscapes they are looking at.

The system would know what they would be looking at from that viewpoint at any given time, thanks to GPS data.

Although this system uses a projector, Samsung and others are already working on transparent displays that could be built into the train window.

It's only a matter of time before the two scenarios meet.