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.
Behind the scenes there is a django backend application that stores and loads information about student’s and their projects from a MySQL database. The frontend is written in Flash and loads its objects from the server via the django application.
The multi-touch and fiducial tracking engine is a combination of the Touchlib and reacTIVision.
My part in this work has been the frontend animation and backend data retrieval in Flash and the Python-based django backend application. Additionally, the connection of the reacTIVision based fiducials to the Flash frontend via TUIO has been established by me.
As the Touchlib and reacTIVision have been used parallely I have built a piece of software in Java that is based on Flosc that integrates TUIO messages of multiple TUIO producers into one TUIO message. This piece of software also allows to use multiple cameras in one multi-touch setup.