Johannes Luderschmidt’s Blog

Recently, I have been working on the Touchlib in order to refine some things, which always bothered me and to add some things of which I think that they would come in handy e.g. a full-grown Pointgrey Flycapture2 filter that allows me to edit the Pointgrey Firefly MV camera’s settings in a way that I described here.

After being able to compile the Touchlib I quickly grew curious about what all those blobconfig parameters in the Touchlib’s config.xml REALLY do.

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As already mentioned in this post, we presented Vispol at the booth of the state of Hessen/Germany at the fair “Moderner Staat” in Berlin on 24. and 25. November 2009. Vispol has been shown on the round multi-touch and TUI table from Sensory Minds.

Here are a few photos from the fair. Please apologize the poor quality of the photos as my camera did not see the sense in making proper use of its auto-focus functionality.

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My software Vispol will be shown at the booth of the state of Hessen/Germany at the fair “Moderner Staat” in Berlin on 24. and 25. November 2009.

It will be shown on the new really cool round [!] multi-touch and TUI table from sensory minds.

I will be there on both days.

In terms of the NUI research project Squidy at the Konstanz University the TUIO overlay SurfaceToTuio has been developed for Microsoft Surface. Download the SurfaceToTuio component from the sourceforge project site (or via direct download).

SurfaceToTuio is available as source code only (there is no executable). However, you can just upload the SurfaceToTuio folder to your Surface, doubleclick the Visual Studio project and compile it in the Surface’s Visual Studio right away.

Finally, a decent software interface for a decent hardware.

Figure 1: The Virttable’s display with (right) and without (left) the chosen IR blocking foil.

Some time back, I’ve bought some infrared blocking foil for the Virttable from the German foil store Ifoha. Infrared blocking foil is an approach for the blocking of ambient infrared light (e.g. from a light bulb or daylight) ONLY in a FTIR multi-touch setup as it blocks light that comes from above the table. I.e. in DI your hands reflect light that would be blocked by an IR blocking foil.
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BumpTop is a Windows Explorer-like application that offers intuitive gestural multi-touch interaction paradigms with piles of files and folders. Additionally, it has a 3D space in which you can navigate and decorate your workspace. You can copy files to and from your usb stick, to Facebook or you can send them via mail. It seems to be integrated well in Windows 7.

I am going to present a few projects on my blog in which I collaborated in one or the other way. The project UNFOCUS – FOCUS is a multi-touch and TUI project that makes use of our fiducialtuioas3 classes.

What is UNFOCUS – FOCUS about?
How can we know what we do not see?
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fiducialtuioas3 now supports pure TUIO messages via TCP.

The bridge TUIO → Flosc → Flash is now being replaced by the bridge TUIO → udp-tcp-bridge → Flash. The latter method renders the transformation of TUIO messages to a proprietary XML dialect obsolete. That speeds up the connection of the TUIO producer (e.g. Touchlib, CCV or Touché) to the Flash application itself (e.g. Vispol, Volvelles) and thus reduces lag.

Hopefully, TUIO producers will support the output of TUIO via TCP natively soon (as far as I know at least Touché does). However, you are on the safe side if you use memo’s cross platform, open source, C++ UDP TCP bridge.

The TCP tuio AS3 classes have been downloaded and adapted for the additional support of fiducials from Touchgateway.

So you can download fiducialtuioas3 in both flavors (via Flosc and via pure TCP TUIO) from the fiducialtuioas3 google code repoitory (on the right).

In the nuigroup there are a threads about fiducialtuioas3 here and here.

Sound design has been an issue that I have disregarded so far in my multi-touch applications. However, a good sound design should be very beneficial for user experience in a multi-touch installation.

As I had no clue on how to create sounds I have been happy when I came across the sound design tutorials of Nick Maxwell. Actually, he sells howto videos for sound design with Ableton Live but he presents his knowledge also via YouTube. Here is an example:

The Laboratoire d’informatique interactive has published open source drivers for Broadcom 5974, Stantum, NTrig or DiamondTouch surface multi-touch devices:

More information about the Stantum SMK-15.4 Multi-Touch Development Kit.