Georg Kaindl the developer of the Open Source multi-touch tracking software for OS X Touché has published a blog post about how a laser light multi-touch setup can be build on your own.

He has also published a video in which he presents how the laser light multi-touch table works:

DIY laser multi-touch table – Raw camera feed from Georg Kaindl on Vimeo.

Update: Some more links:
Nuigroup LLP Wiki page
Alex P’s initial LLP setup at the nuigroup

Simon Lehmann, a fellow student of mine from the visualization classes of the Computer Sciences department at the Wiesbaden University of Applied Sciences, has created the very nice Wikipedia visualization Wivi in the work of his Diploma thesis:

Screenshot of Wivi

We are proudly announcing that the Virttable will feature at an IT exhibition called iTec ’08 at the darmstadtium in Darmstadt, Germany on 6 and 7 November.

This is a small version of the poster with which we will present features of the Virttable at iTec ’08:

Multi-touch table The Virttable poster

Many thanks to Melanie Seyer, who designed the poster for me!

Update: Two photographs from our booth at the iTEC:

Virttable booth at iTEC '08

Johannes Luderschmidt and the Virttable booth at iTEC '08

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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I’ve found many instructions in the nuigroup forum on how to configure the Pointgrey Firefly MV Firewire camera in a multi-touch setup and especially with the Touchlib.

As information about this topic is widely scattered, I want to write down some helpful steps on how to configure the Firefly in this post.

Pointgrey Firefly MV with Tamron zoom lens mounted with tripod bracket

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