king talk

As the year marking the 90th anniversary of the establishment of the Bauhaus, 2009 is an appropriate year for an exhibition dedicated to the examination of the social networks of the Bauhaus movement.
In preparation for this project, biographical details of all of the members of the Bauhaus, as well as their individual personal relationships with other members, will be systematically structured and entered into an online research database.
The impressive volume of information resulting from this effort will then be presented in three dimensions within this illuminated 4×4 meter cube at the Bauhaus University in Weimar.

The exhibition then becomes an immersive yet highly-structured digital archive rich with historical details. Complex interrelationships will be made more accessible through the implementation of an innovative graphical interface. All visualizations of the complex network are drawn directly from the research database and presented in an intuitive computer-generated form. At an interactive digital tabletop, spectators can furthermore examine individual parts of the greater network in more detail.

more information at Impuls-Bauhaus

Gestures are common place in multi touch application development. Interaction Designers need icons for wireframing or just for documentation of the work. Ryan Lee released a vector based icon set for gesture under Creative Commons Licence. You don´t need to reinvent the wheel again. This so called Gesturecons include 42 icons for the most popular gesture like panning, flickering etc. You can download it the zip with .ai, .pdf and .eps files here…

via UX Strategie

I think nearly everybody has noticed the release of Apple’s magic mouse, a pimped out mouse featuring multi touch technology. After three years of hype around that technology it finds its way at mobile phones and newly on this over 40 year old input device. What would Mr Engelbart would have thought about it?

Nearly as long as we are using the mouse, Apple and Microsoft are fighting one another. After the first rumours about a new multi touch mouse came up earlier this month, Microsoft released some ideas for a multi touch mouse. Just watch and enjoy… the FTIR mouse is weird, the »Side Mouse« could be a complety new experience (I´m not sure if it’s positive or negative). At the end I like the mechanical solution of the »Arty Mouse« somehow. Could probably work for 5 fingers?

The Klimahaus Bremerhaven 8° Ost is a new theme attraction which was opened for public last weekend in Bremerhaven (Germany). Some current videos about it can be found at german news channels ZDF mediathek and ntv online.

This unique new theme attraction will give answers to these questions while sending its visitors on a memorable journey around the world. The Klimahaus with its authentically simulated climate zones, multimedia-staging, interactive exhibits, large aquariums costed about 11 million Euros and is a »theme attraction« for the new generation.

envis precisely developed the multitouch application running on three seperate media tables at Klimahaus for mehr:wert. Three different virtual books, from munich based company gameworker, filled with informations about the sponsors can be paged through and dragged around the surface. Additional features like zooming and painting were added to the application just to improve joy of use. Some additional media content will be published at our official portfolio the next weeks. So stay tuned and subscribe our RSS feed.

Having a big ass multitouch table at home might be cool. But while you are developing the awesome apps you gonna run on it, it´s quite annoying to test them on that big thing. Basically there are 3 alternative ways to more or less »simulate« the multitouch behaviour:

1. iPhone/iPod Touch > OSCemote > flosc > Flash

My favourite one is using the multitouch ability of my iPod Touch. Running OSCemote (iTunes) on your iPod you can send the multitouch input via WiFi to your MacBook Pro. There you just need to forward the data via FLOSC (Flash Open Sound Control) to use it in Flash. This setup provides the best multitouch feeling for the least effort.

Alternate tools, but more or less complex to handle: TouchOSC, MRMR or SWAP.

2. cardboard prototype > CCV > Flash

Before using my iPod as tracking device I used »NHALT«, a Cheap Multitouch Pad we built in about 30min. using a white paper, some slices of a packing case and a 3-year-old Webcam (Logitech Quickcam) for about 30 EUR. Since the NUI Group upgraded their Tracking Software from »tbeta« to »CCV« it is the only step you need between the pad and Flash. This solution is real fun if you like a little DIY and is the one closest to a real table.

3. SimTouch > SocketServer > Flash

You don’t have an iPod Touch, DIY is not your thing or you don’t want to relay on good lighting for testing your awesome app then SimTouch might be the solution for you. This multitouch simulator  is an elegant semi-transparent window you can lay over your flash application. Via SocketServer the signal gets relayed to Flash and off you go!

If you know a possible fourth solution. Feel free to comment it…

Sorry, there was to much SPAM to leave the comments open.

What most of the media tables out there (especially multi-touch tables) are missing is haptics: Touching a multi-touch table surface to sort photos or resize maps is great, but try using it without looking, and your fingers will quickly wander off that on-screen virtual button, slider, or keyboard. The SLAP project changes this — by letting you put real, physical widget set like a keypad (a), knob (b), slider (c), keyboardknobs (d), and other controls right onto the table. Being able to feel those controls makes it much easier to use them without looking.

The trick: the controls are made from silicone and acrylic, so they are transparent, and the computer inside the table can detect their position on the table surface and project the right labeling right onto those controls from underneath. This makes it easy to, say, relabel a SLAP Keyboard from US to German keyboard layout (without paying much money to Art Lebedevs OLED keyboard), or to make a SLAP Button look like a Play button to control videos in one instant, and the next moment turn it into a button to save a file.

But how do SLAP controls know what they should be controlling? Easy — just double-tap your finger, say, next to a SLAP Keyboard and on a text editing window at the same time, and the two are connected: whatever you type on the SLAP keyboard will end up in the text window. This way, SLAP controls bring haptic and tactile feedback back into the world of virtual, on-screen table interfaces, combining the advantages of physical and on-screen controls. And since they are just passive objects, with no electronics, they are simple, robust, and cheap — something researchers and designers will appreciate when prototyping the tabletop applications of the future. For more information, visit the website of RWTH Aachen.

Our Chemieraum projects input device had a similar approach. We think that a combination of tools and touch will be the future or what do you think?

The tuioZone library for Processing provides a way to set zones within a multi-touch screen to respond in useful ways to TUIO messages sent from a tracking application, like tbeta. It processes TUIO events and provides methods to get data about each zone and related cursor data. This library, an alpha version, is very much a work in progress. We are currently working with Flash, but Processing gives you more possibilities using OpenGL stuff. The library can be downloaded here.

Just unzip and put the extracted tuioZones folder into the libraries folder of your processing sketches. The source code, a reference Javadoc, and examples are included in the folder. You will also need the oscP5 library.

via nuigroup

We have a new project online. It´s a multi-touch portfolio installation, called molecule mt. This was developed in collaboration with Christian Perstl earlier this year.

For further information you have to visit the project page.

Besides the talks at TOCA ME 2009 (Munich) the visitors could play around with a 70inch multi touch table from strukt. The struktable was running different playful apps. Often very abstract, like a color picker tool, but fun to interact and watch.

You can find the whole documentation of the multi touch research at www.multitouch.at. They´re using vvvv for the blob detections and as software for creating interface elements. While they were developing the application, they used the 15 inch wide screen multi touch display from Stantum, the SMK 15.4. It´s affordable, you can buy the developer kit (including API) for about 3.000 EUR.

Another great Blog for multi touch research is the one from Tim Roth (Zürich). At his blog you can find the latest news about hardware and software regarding multi touch tables. Another nice developer blog comes from Johannes Luder Schmidt. Just check both. If you´re interested in multi touch, you still may know the NUI Group from Sweden. They are one of the early pioneers in documenting multi touch development for the masses and they have a great tracker called tbeta (former touchlib). This tracker and some demo applications can be downloaded for free and installed for all systems. We used it for our german multi touch tutorial and had really good results. Alternatives are the Touché framework (Mac only) and the opentouch. Jens Franke (PAGE author) said that they should track faster and more precisely. That´s what we need  ; )

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It starts quite standard. Two people are juggling circles on a multi-touch wall. But then, they start using brushes and sponges to draw on the wall, there’s physics simulation and finally there’s people playing space invaders the way it’s supposed to work: by throwing rubber balls at a huge screen.

Plus: music by sigur rós.

Multitouch Barcelona

via Fabrik