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.

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.
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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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It has been a while since I gave a presentation about Natural User Interfaces at the webandwine event by the company mediaman on 7 May 2009. However, I found those two quite nice pictures of my presentation on the blog of Frank Hamm that I wanted to show here:

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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.

In his Bachelor thesis Frederic Frieß enhanced the original Touchlib TUIO AS3 classes with support for fiducials (or to speak in TUIO terms with support for /tuio/2dobj messages).

Thus, the Touchlib’s TUIO classes can simply be replaced with Frederic’s classes and everything should still work as before. However, there is one slight change in the package structure: the TUIO classes are now lying inside the package tuio and not in the package flash.events.

I have made Frederic’s Tuio Fiducial AS3 classes available on Google code in a project called fiducialtuioas3.

If you want to use reacTIVision fiducials in Flash, Flex or Adobe Air you are heartily invited to use these classes in your private and professional project.

Examples of what has been done so far with those classes:
Tangible Vispol
Pf Design Media Installation

If you have a nice project with fiducialtuioas3 it would be great if you shared a link with us via mail or in the comments.

Finally, the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona guys around Martin Kaltenbrunner released a special page for TUIO that explains the protocol in more detail and with some examples. In the past it had not been that easy to extract all necessary information from their TUIO paper.

Just in time, before they will hopefully release TUIO 2, which supports OSC via TCP and thus a support for Flash without the need for Flosc or Toxy as Flash does not support native connections via UDP sockets.

Additionally, they moved the reacTIVision site to sourceforge, which seems to be a step that makes sense.