My 2nd table now has got a lid and the paintwork has been done (the color is bright white). It looks really professional now. I updated my multi-touch table photoset on flickr:

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Our article about the project TimeTube we’ve been developing since last year has been published by the G.I.T Laboratory Journal Europe in the current Laboratory Journal issue 7-8/2008.

TimeTube article

Feel free to download the article TimeTube – Assist Scientists to Enhance Laboratory Scheduling in PDF format.

I’m currently playing around with several visualization toolkits resp. visualization frameworks. There seem to be some very nice products on the (open source) market. I’m focussing on the Flash AS3 toolkit flare, because the multi-touch libraries are very nicely integrated with Flash. However, flare seems to be just an AS3 implementation of Prefuse, which seems to be exactly the same in Java (and has been there at first).

The main guy behind Prefuse (and flare as well) seems to be Jeffrey
Heer from the Berkeley University’s Computer Science Division.

Anyway, Jeffrey seems to have a quite decent music taste as the name of Prefuse is related to one of the music projects (you don’t call them bands anymore…) of Warp Records:

Where did the “prefuse” name come from?
Prefuse intially began as a set of support classes for an experiment with different visualization algorithms, pursued within CS270, a graduate computer theory course at UC Berkeley. At the time, we (Alan Newberger and I) were listening to the electronica / hip-hop musician prefuse 73. The initial commit of the classes to a CVS repository forced us to give them a name. Following a sort of “you-are-what-you-eat” logic we named it after what we happened to be listening to at the time. Once enshrined as the name of the CVS module, the “prefuse” name stuck. Warp Records was even kind enough to provide permission to use the prefuse 73 track “Storm Returns” in the original prefuse demo video.

Here is a screencast from one of the visualization possibilites that Prefuse offers you the so called Treeview:

Here is a screencast from the Flare demo app:

Play around with the Flare Demo app online.

look also here.

We presented our Digital Volvelles multi-touch application during the ‘Final Degree Show 2008′ of the MA Communication Design study programme at Central Saint Martins London College of Art and Design. View the
Multi-touch Volvelles exhibition Flickr set.

I’ve been awarded a travel award by the Association of Laboratory Automation as a representative for our 3D interactive visualisation project TimeTube. Here’s a link to the poster program PDF of that fair: Laboratory Automation 08 :: Poster Program