New Hollywood Hard Rock Cafe Sparkles with Interactive Multi-touch Wall and Microsoft Surface Booths!

I came across a blogpost entitled "Tourist in my own town". In this post, the author shares is positive experience of his visit to the new Hard Rock Cafe, located on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.  I loved his comment:  "A whole wall of Microsoft software running and not a single BSOD!"  In addition to the interactive wall, visitors have the chance to play with the content on Microsoft's interactive Surface tables. Below is a picture from the post from the Sure Beats Work blog:



-Sure Beats Work


A recent post on the Hard Rock Cafe blog provides more information about the interactive technologies at the Hollywood site: "Hard Rock International Rocks Its Way to Hollywood Boulevard":


New Look ~ New Vibe ~ New Memorabilia Technology
"In the latest example of Hard Rock’s concept-driven design evolution, the Hollywood Boulevard cafe was developed to integrate technology, creating a new look and vibe that will rock Hollywood. Hard Rock Cafe Hollywood on Hollywood Boulevard showcases new and unique interactive experiences for guests – from an 18’ x 4’ Rock Wall™ to touch screens in booths throughout the cafe to Microsoft Surface™, each featuring innovative multi-touch technology that enables fans to explore the world’s greatest rock ‘n’ roll memorabilia collection and virtually tour all of Hard Rock’s venues worldwide."

"In addition to the cutting-edge multimedia memorabilia experience, hundreds of items from Hard Rock’s iconic collection adorn the walls of Hard Rock Cafe Hollywood on Hollywood Boulevard, including items from many of the world’s most beloved and recognizable musicians, as well as contemporary artists with local ties. Key memorabilia items are now on display, from Jimi Hendrix’s purple crushed velvet hat; to Janis Joplin’s love letter to then boyfriend Peter LeBlanc; Jim Morrison’s leather pants and handwritten lyrics to “L.A. Woman”; to Katy Perry’s sparkly dress and Fergie’s tour outfit worn while on tour with the Black Eyed Peas."

The memorabilia wall was created for the Hard Rock Cafe by Obscura Digital, a company that is involved in off-the-desktop ubiquitous computing, including ambient technologies that include natural-user interfaces and interaction. Obscura Digital aims to "make data pervasive and accessible in almost any situation, allowing virtually any surface to be turned into a portal to the Internet".  


The Memorabilia Wall has been installed in several Hard Rock Cafes around the world- additional pictures can be found on the Obscura Digital website.The first installation of the wall was at the Hard Rock Cafe in Las Vegas in 2009. - Below is the interaction of the wall at the Las Vegas Hard Rock Cafe:

-Obscura Digital

The following video, set to Beck's "Elevator Music", provides a great demonstration of the Hard Rock Cafe Memorabilia application as experienced on the Surface:

Hard Rock memorabilia app for Microsoft Surface (extended) from Duncan/Channon on Vimeo.
(The music in the video "Elevator Music, by Beck.)


RELATED
My megapost about the Hard Rock Cafe interactive wall and website:

Interactive Memorabilia at the Hard Rock Cafe: 
Microsoft's Multi-touch Rock Wall, Companion Surface Installations, and Awesome Touch-Responsive Interactive Memorabilia Website

Below is a screenshot of the main portal of the Hard Rock Cafe interactive memorabilia website, which compliments the "real" wall. You can interact with all 1532 items and learn more about the history behind the various artists.  It is fun to play with on a touch-screen display!


Duncan Channon: Sin City Memorabilia Interfaces


SOMEWHAT RELATED
Obscura Digital
Obscura Digital's Cuelight, and interactive pool table at the SOHO Esquire House:

Cuelight from Obscura Digital on Vimeo.
"Featured at the Esquire House's "Ultimate Bachelor Pad" in NYC, the one-of-a kind Obscura CueLight projection system turns a game of pool into an amazing interactive art display"

Johannes Schoening & Friends Research: Videos of Multi-User Interaction on Multi-touch Walls and Tables

In this post, I'm featuring videos of the interactive work of Johannes Schoening, a member of the NUI-Group, and his collaborators. Johhannes works at the Innovative Retail Laboratory of the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence ( DFKI ) in Saarbrücken. Prof. Dr. Antonio Krüger is director of this lab.   He also works with Michael Rohs at the Deutsche Telekom Laboratories in Berlin. 

Johannes received a Diploma in Geoinformatik at the University of Münster at the Institute for Geoinformatics in 2007.  His research interests are new methods and interfaces to intuitive navigate through spatial information or in general new intelligent interfaces that help people to solve daily tasks more effectively.  His interests include mobile augmented reality applications, the use of Wikipedia as a knowledge database, and home grown multi-touch surfaces . (More information can be found on Johannes' website.)

Note:  The 2010 Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces conference will be held in Germany, and Johannes and others will be involved with running it. You can follow the news on Twitter:  http://twitter.com/its_Germany2010.  The link to the conference website will be up soon, at http://www.its2010.org/ .

The descriptions below each video are from Johannes' YouTube Research Channel.

Multi-touch Risk

"A multi-touch and multi-user version of the classical Risk game. As a platform Nasa World Wind (WWJ) and the Java implementation of Risk "Domination" by yura.net were used. A authentication method (that was also integrated in the game) can be found in the last (next)  video. Thanks to Klaus Drerup & Wadim Hamm."  TEAM:  Klaus Drerup, Wadim Hamm, Florian Daiber, & Johannes Schoening.  Music by cycom: mathematics.

User Authentication on Large Multi-touch Wall with Mobile Device

"The exploitation of finger and hand tracking technology based on infrared light, such as FTIR, Diffused Illumina- tion (DI) or Diffused Surface Illumination (DSI) has enabled the construction of large-scale, low-cost, interactive multi-touch surfaces. In this context, access and security problems arise if larger teams operate these surfaces with different access rights. The team members might have several levels of authority or specific roles, which determine what functions and objects they are allowed to access via the multi-touch surface. In this video we present first concepts and strategies to authenticate with a large-scale multi-touch wall using a mobile device."

GeoLens: Allowing Multi-User Interaction with Geographic Information Systems on Interactive Surfaces

"This video shows the GlobalData application in use on an Archimedes SessionDesk http://www.archimedes-products.com/se The application was used to illustrate our GeoLens concept. GeoLenses are GUI widgets that can be used like scalable as well as zoomable magnifying lenses to allow synchronous multi-user interaction in GIS systems."

Elastic Creative, Delphi Productions, GestureTek, & the Metronic HRS multi-touch table and wall

I came across this on the Elevating Interactivity blog:
Medtronic HRS Conference Tables & Walls -Elevating Interactivity, 11/10/09

Elastic Creative and Delphi Productions collaborated to create the Metronic HRS multi-touch table and wall application.  The hardware system was by GestureTek.

Medtronic is a medical technologies company that has been around for many years. Some of their projects include the Activa deep brain stimulation therapy used to treat Parkinson's disease and other conditions, pain management therapies, and more.






Here are the videos:




Medtronic HRS 2009 Multitouch Table from Elastic Creative on Vimeo.

SOMEWHAT RELATED
The following is a video featuring Elastic Creative's work with Colardo Creative for Immersion, a company that creates systems and technology that integrates touch feedback into products, including medical simulators used in training physicians for minimally invasive surgical techniques.

Immersion Brand Video from Elastic Creative on Vimeo.

BBC Video about Immersion's medical simulation application:



Elevating Interactivity's 6 Levels of Interaction

Interactive Video Art in Action: MuchoWall from Tangible Display (and Jimmy Hertz)

 

Photo of MuchoWall, an 80" multimodal sensitive wall from Tangible Displays (Jimmy Hertz, Founder)

Jimmy Hertz is a member of the NUI-Group and has been involved in various activities to spread the world about natural-user interfaces and interaction.



Be sure to watch the entire video. It is almost like watching a dance performance when you watch artist interact with the display.


Thanks, Seth Sandler, for the the link!

BEN: Breakable Experimental Network Simulation on a Multi-touch Wall (RENCI)

BEN, or Breakable Experiemental Network, is a mix of network visualization and multi-touch technology on a very large screen. The project aims to provide better network monitoring and management tools in a user-friendly, intuitive and efficient manner. It is also looks like great tool for learning about network engineering.

Hands-on networking!

BEN is part of the GENI project.

The music in the video is by Crystal Castles and Black Moth Super Rainbow.

Cross-posted: The World Is My Interface

Accenture's Interactive Wall for the Louvre Exhibit at the High Museum

I just came across Lauren Hayne's blog about her experience developing the Accenture Interactive Wall for the Louvre exhibit at the High Museum in Atlanta during the first part of 2009.  Lauren is an analyst at Accenture.

FYI

Louvre Atlanta uses Accenture's Interactive Technology to Explore Changing Nature of Masterpieces

Interactive Wall Technology: Seeing the Big Picture

Louvre Atlanta Case Study(pdf)

Interactive Technology Fact Sheet (pdf)

Demo of Duke University's multi-touch wall at RENCI, running the Cobalt Metaverse Browser

The video below shows the "pre-alpha" version of the Cobalt Metaverse Browser:



"This video shows the Cobalt metaverse browser being tested on a 13-foot by 5-foot multi-touch visualization wall equipped with six high-definition projectors located at the Renaissance Computing Institute engagement center at Duke University. The input drivers are being developed by Dr. Xunlei Wu so that users can directly manipulate high-resolution data using both hands and multiple fingers for a more natural and intuitive data exploration experience. In the video, Dr. Wu is using both gesture and touch to navigate through, and rearrange content between, two Cobalt virtual worlds."

Related:
The Open Cobalt Project (on ning)
Cobalt Website & link to download to the latest pre-alpha build
Cobalt Community,
Cobalt Google Group
EduSim (A 3D multi-user virtual world platform and authoring toolkit for K-12 interactive whiteboards. The latest version is powered by Cobalt)

Cobalt can import objects from the Google 3D warehouse as well as Google Sketch-up:
Video Tutorial: Using Google 3D Warehouse to build Cobalt & Edusim Virtual Worlds

People:
Julian Lombardi, Duke University
Xunlei Wu, Senior Visualization Researcher, RENCI, Duke University
Rich White, EduSim; Greenbush Education Service Center, Girard, KS

Kids using Cobalt-based EduSim on desktop computers, via Rich White:

RENCI at Duke University: Multi-Touch Collaborative Wall and Table utilizing TouchLib; More about UNC-C's Viz lab...

RENCI is a multi-disciplinary collaboration between several universities in North Carolina, with centers located at the Europa Center, Duke University, N.C. State, UNC Chapel Hill, East Carolina University, UNC-Asheville, UNC-Charlotte, and the Health Sciences Library at UNC-Chapel Hill. Many of the centers focus on visualization and collaborative technologies, and have been involved in multi-touch "surface" computing.

The pictures below are from the RENCI center at Duke University:

Duke Multi-Touch Collaborative Wall

The multi-touch wall is 13 x 5 feet, and utilizes six high-definition projectors, resulting in a combined resolution of 5760-2160, and supports multiple users. According to information on the RENCI website, the design is scalable and applicable to non-flat surfaces. The wall system runs on Windows and Linux.

(Photo by Josh Coyle)

(Photo by Josh Coyle)

DI, or Direct Illumination is used for touch detection in both the wall and the table for detecting touch. A separate instance of Touchlib runs for each of the 8 cameras used to detect touch. A gesture engine interprets the information about touches on the screen as gesture events. Each camera is handled separately for image processing and blob tracking tasks.

Graphics from the RENCI Vis Group Multi-Touch Blog

Here is cool picture of the "Multi-touch Calibration Device", which uses a built-in TouchLib utility.

Additional information can be found on the RENCI Vis Group Multi-Touch Blog.

FYI

Touchlib is a multi-touch development kit that can be found on the NUI-Group website.

"Touchlib is a library for creating multi-touch interaction surfaces. It handles tracking blobs of infrared light, and sends your programs these multi-touch events, such as 'finger down', 'finger moved', and 'finger released'. It includes a configuration app and a few demos to get you started, and will interace with most types of webcams and video capture devices. It currently works only under Windows but efforts are being made to port it to other platforms."

If you are interested in creating your own multi-touch table, the NUI-Group website and forums are a great place to start.

Related:

If you follow my blog, you probably know that I've taken several graduate courses at UNC-Charlotte. Some of my professors and a classmate or two have been involved in some exciting visualization research over the past year. (If you are serious about multi-touch and other visually-based applications, it is worth taking some time to familiarize yourself with visualization and interaction research.)

News from the UNC-Charlotte Vis Center:

At the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, RENCI is a collaboration between the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute, the Center for Applied Geographic Information Science, and the Charlotte Visualization Center.

11/06/2008
Robert Kosara’s group wins two awards at IEEE VisWeek Caroline Ziemkiewicz and Robert Kosara won Honorable Mention (the second highest award) at the IEEE InfoVis Conference for their paper, “The Shaping of Information by Visual Metaphors”. Also, Alex Godwin, Kosara’s student, won Best Poster for his submission, “Visual Data Mining of Unevenly-Spaced Event Sequences”.

The Vis Center is pretty fascinating, as you can see by the group of visitors at an open house.

If you are just as fascinated by this stuff as the guys in the picture, here are links to some recent papers by UNC-Charlotte faculty affiliated with the Vis Center:

The Shaping of Information by Visual Metaphors (Caroline Ziemkiewicz and Robert Kosara)

Evaluating the Relationship Between User Interaction and Financial Visual Analysis (Don Hyun Jeong, Wenwen Dou, Felsia Stukes, William Ribarsky, Heather Richter Lipford, Remco Chang)

Visual Analytics for Complex Concepts Using a Human Cognition Model (Tera Marie Green, William Ribarsky, and Brian Fisher)