If you follow my blog, you know that I have a TouchSmart, and that I'm a little obsessed about surface-gesture-touch-screen-multi-touch-multi-user computing....
Here is some good news!
According to a recent article from Rich Brown's Crave blog (CNET news), programming guidelines for the TouchSmart require developers to be know C# and Windows Presentation Foundation. That's great for me, since I can program in C# and I've been playing with WPF for nearly a year.
Despite what Rich Brown says, I know that the TouchSmart has at least duo-touch capabilities, since the touch-screen technology was provided by NextWindow, and the TouchSmart has been used for multi-touch demos created by FingerTapps. It is possible for the TouchSmart to handle input from multiple mice, too.
Hopefully Windows 7 will make it easier for developers to harness the power of the TouchSmart. I have so many ideas I'd like to see come to fruition.
Are you interested in multi-touch gestures for multimedia tabletop applications, tangible or surface computing, and interaction design? Take a look at this video of Grafiti:
Alessandro De Nardi, a student in computer science at the University of Pisa, Italy, has worked on Grafiti during Google's Summer of Code and is still involved with the project. Alessandro, a member of the NUI-group, is also in the Music Technology Group of Barcelona's UPF University. Allesandro was supervised by by Martin Kaltenbrunner and Sergi Jorda, of the reactable project.
"Grafiti is a C# framework built on top of the Tuio client that manages multi-touch interactions in table-top interfaces. The possible use of tangible objects is particularly contemplated. It is designed to support the use of third party modules for (specialized) gesture recognition algorithms. However a set of modules for the recognition of some basic gestures is included in this project.
The development is in the alpha state, going to beta soon.
The goals I've been aiming at are: generality, versatility, speed of execution, extensibility, ease of programming (integration) of external modules (simple APIs and protocols) and effective interface design with regards to HCI aspects." -Alessandro De Nardi Demos in binary form are available for download for MacOSX and Windows on the Google Grafiti site. There is a Grafiti site on Sourceforge. Apparently the alpha version will work on all 32-bit MS Windows,, BSD platforms, and POSIX (linux).
(Note: This post was updated on 12/14/08 and includes corrections.)
