HACKED KINECT MULTITOUCH using libFreenect and libTISCH (via Florian Echtler)

MULTI-TOUCH WITH HACKED KINECT
Here is NUI-Group member Florian Echtler's  proof-of-concept HD video of using a hacked Kinect camera for multitouch-like interaction.  The application was built on Ubuntu Linux written using libfreenect, by marcan42  and Florian's creation, libTISCH.



Florian decided to use picture-browsing interaction to demonstrate proof-of concept, so "everybody can focus on more interesting things :-)"


(I have SO many ideas for this!  I'll throw a few out there in an upcoming post....maybe someone can run with them!)


RELATED
Hacked Kinect taught to work as multitouch interface
Paul Miller, engadget, 11/11/10


FOR THE TECH-CURIOUS:
TISCH stands for Tangible Interactive Surfaces for Collaboration between Humans, and is a cross-platform, cross device multi-touch development framework.  You can download the source package for Windows, MacOS X, and Linux from the TISCH Sourceforge website. The Ubantu Lucid/Karmac version has "superquick installation via PPA" - the instructions can be found on the TISCH Sourceforge website.


LibFreenect- Open Source PC Drivers for Kinect
Xan Tium, XBLOG 360 11/10/10

Marcan is Hector Martin Cantero, the author of the Abort, Retry, Hack? blog.

For your convenience, I've reposted something I wrote about libTISCH back in 2009:

libTISCH, a multi-touch development framework with multi-touch widgets and more!

For techies (and the tech-curious) who like technologies that support collaboration and multi-touch interaction,  this is great news!

Florian Echtler announced the first stable releas of libTISCH, a multi-touch development framwork, which can be found on Sourceforge.  TISCH stands for Tangible Interaction Surfaces for Collaboration between Humans.  libTISCH, a C++ software framework, is included in this project.  It provides a means for creating GUIs based on multi-touch and/or tangible input devices.

Here is how it works:

Here is information from libTISCH announcement:

Highlights of this release are, among others, the following features:

- ready-to-use multitouch widgets based on OpenGL
- reconfigurable, hardware-independent gesture recognition engine
- support for widely used (move, scale, rotate..), pre-defined gestures
 as well as custom-defined gestures

- hardware drivers for FTIR, DI, Wiimote, DiamondTouch..
- TUIO converters: source and sink

- cross-platform: Linux, MacOS X, Windows (32 and 64 bit)
- cross-language: C++ with bindings for C#, Java, Python

libTISCH has a lot to offer for the multitouch developer. For example, 

the textured widgets enable rapid development of applications for many
kinds of multi-touch or tangible interfaces. The separate gesture
recognition engine allows the translation of a wide range of highly
configurable gestures into pre-defined or custom events which are then
acted on by the widgets. While the lower layers of libTISCH provide
functionality similar to tbeta, touche etc. (you can interface existing
TUIO-based software with libTISCH in both directions), it goes far
beyond.

More information about the library and underlying architecture can be found on http://tisch.sf.net/ and in the Sourceforge wiki at
http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/tisch/

TISCH Project Wiki

Note:

Dr. Florian Echtler is on the scientific staff at the Technisch Universitat Munchen in Germany. Be sure to check out his  webpage.

I especially like the concept of the MeTaTop: "A Multi-Sensory Table Top System for Medical Procedures" that is linked from Florian's website.