I helped Sensory Minds to build an interactive multi-touch and tangible media installation for a Werkschau of students from the Hochschule Pforzheim. Graduates are represented by objects that are provided with a fiducial on the underside and a picture of the work on the upper side. As soon as the object is added to the table, pictures of the student’s projects will be loaded and circularly arranged around the object. Those pictures can be browsed via multi-touch. If a user taps on a project picture all pictures to this project will be loaded and will be arranged on a second circle around the project images.
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As part of my Master’s thesis with the title ‘Conception, Realization and Evaluation of Multi-Touch Interfaces for Interactive Visualizations’ there has been the goal to create an interactive visualization that can be used via multi-touch. Finally, this visualization should be evaluated, which means it should be thoroughly tested and there should be some results in numbers.

This multi-touch visualization should be different from the common multi-touch use cases scaling/rotating images and zooming in maps. Additionally, this visualization should have a dedicated use and should not just be a prototype that demoes basic multi-touch capabilities.

Vispol

I have been intrigued by the interactive visualizations in Minority Report, which provided natural user interaction for profiling activities of a policeman in future.
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The second multi-touch table, that I have built is called The Virttable, which stands for Versatile Illumination Research Touch Table.

This table is the property of the department for Design, Computer Science and Media (DCSM) of the Wiesbaden University of Applied Sciences, which provided me with the money for the components of the Virttable. (Actually, we had student fees for a short time in Hessen/Germany. From a part of these student fees the Virttable has been built. Thank you, dear students!!! There’s no cent of public money in the Virttable.) Amongst others those parts include:

• a Panasonic PT AX 200 projector
• a Unibrain Fire-i Firewire camera
• a Pointgrey Firefly MV firewire (mono version) camera
• a B+W infrared filter 092 (low-pass, lets transmit 90% of infrared light above 730 nm)
• lots of Osram SFH 485P infrared LEDs
• 162 Osram SFH 4550 infrared LEDs for FTIR illumination Their min. radiant intensity is 400 mW/sr at 100mA while the min. radiant intensity of a SFH 485P LED is 4.5 mW/Sr at 100mA. Taken the LED’s half angles into consideration (3 for the SFH 4550 resp. 40 for the SFH 485P) this means that the SFH 4550 has around 6.5 times more light than the SFH 485P.
• Six high power infrared LEDs with 4 led’s on one dye (Aculed VHL IR 4-chip High Power LEDs) for Diffuse Illumination
• two panes of acrylic glass (I burned the surface of the second pane, a Plexiglass EndLighten pane, while trying to apply a Lexel/Toluene dilution on top of it)
• A standard acrylic glass
• MDF boards for the box

The computer that I have used in the Virttable is my Mac Mini.
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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.

For the website benjamin-bartels.com I have done all the frontend (xhtml, css, js) and the backend programming. One part of the website is Benjamin’s CV:

In another part Benjamin presents images and videos of portfolio projects that he has done so far. Those images and videos can be browsed easily with a paging navigation:

To be able to add and modify jobs, images and videos Benjamin wanted a backend in which he could easily upload pictures and videos of portfolio projects he has done so far. Thus, I have created a mini Portfolio CMS (written in PHP, using a MySQL database) in which Benjamin can edit his projects, can apply them to categories (e.g. advertising, editorial/print, illustration) and can finally upload images and videos with short descriptions:

Update: As benjamin-bartels.com has been intended to be used for his application tour Benjamin took most of the content offline after he has found himself a nice job. However, in this (very, very nice) gringografico job you can at least see how jobs have been intended to be used.