I really like Donald Norman’s essay »Natural User Interfaces Are Not Natural« that he wrote for the ACM interactions magazine. In this essay Norman shares his view on the role of natural user interfaces (for him represented, e.g., by »speech, gesture, or the tapping of the body’s electrical signals for “thought control,”«) in terms of interaction with future computer systems.
Read the rest of this entry »

Throng (Tuio multiplexeR that crOps and Globalizes) provides a Tuio multiplexer with added benefits written in Java.

Read the rest of this entry »

I am Stunned

Read the rest of this entry »

I am going to present a few projects on my blog which I like. This post introduces the Umami project of Florian Cannon, Robert Fläck, Florian Gondolf, Mischa Korn, Daniel Pehnec, Sarah Martens, Tara Staton from Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences. umami proposes the the integration of multi-touch surfaces in kitchens of the future for the support of cooking.

Read the rest of this entry »

Fancy: Special drinking glasses, which allow to recognize the amount of fluid in the glasses.

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Update: The project of the Konstanz University has a bug, which has been resolved by Julian. Check out the stuff in his repository.

I am going to present a few projects on my blog in which I collaborated in one or the other way. This post introduces Fabio Campos‘s VotkA (Visualization of the k-means Algorithm) project of the course Visualization in the Master’s studies of Computer Sciences at the RheinMain University of Applied Sciences. Fabio’s project is a 3D visualization of the k-means algorithm applied to Fisher’s dataset. The user can interact with the visualization via reacTIVision/Fiducials or the OSCRemote application on the iPhone/iPod Touch.

Figure 1: 3D scatter plot of Fisher’s dataset assorted with the k-means algorithm

In VotkA users can interact with a three-dimensional cluster analysis visualization via a Tangible User Interface (TUI), the iPhone app OSCRemote or both in parallel. The TUI is provided by a small box that is technically based on Seth Sandler’s cheap multi-touch pad (you can see the box in the youtube video at the end of this article). On top of the box fiducials from reacTIVision are being tracked. Whenever a fiducial is being recognized a TUIO message with the fiducial’s id, position and rotation will be sent to VotkA.
Read the rest of this entry »