king talk

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