Johannes Luderschmidt
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.
I am Stunned
Fancy: Special drinking glasses, which allow to recognize the amount of fluid in the glasses.
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.
Important: I discontinued the work for fiducialtuioas3. If you are starting a new project, consider using our new AS3 Tuio library Tuio AS3. As you most certainly came here because you want to use fiducials in AS3 find the according Tuio AS3 fiducial howto 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.
This video presents the results of the Bachelor thesis of Frederic Friess at the Vislab of the Wiesbaden University of Applied Sciences. I have been Frederic’s mentor under the guidance of Prof. Dr. Doerner for this work.
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.
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:
The computer that I have used in the Virttable is my Mac Mini.