openFrameworks: Better Tools, Enhanced Creativity, Better Projects: YES. Artists can make tools at the same time they make artwork.
To learn all about this, delve into the video. It highlights interviews with creative people who are using openFrameworks, including their innovative work.
If you are working with openFrameworks, or thinking about it, let me know.
This looks like a great tool to use for projects I'm creating for my new HP TouchSmart....
.....and my multi-touch thought experiments ; }
I learned about openFrameworks from Seth Sandler, aka "cerupcat", a member of NUI-group who was chosen to participate in Google's Summer of Code. He's posted about his progress on his AudioTouch blog.
Here is a screenshot of Seth's tracking application, still under development, is the result of porting touchlib, the main tracker used by NUI-Group members, to openFrameworks:
It is always exciting to see what members of the NUI group are doing!
Here is a new video of a multi-touch creation by some of the members of the NUI group. Although this is a proof-of-concept example, it is fun to see how it is played out, using the little iPhone-like touch-pad widgets as a navigation tool for the large screen.
Read the "Multi-touch Goodness" article in Gizmodo of an interview with Christian Moore about this demo and his Luxopen-source framework. (Christian is a colleague of Harry van derVeen, both members of the NUI group.)
Here is an excerpt from the interview: "JD: Why Flash? CM: Because it's fast to prototype in. However, the software is broken into several segments. One C++ application that tracks hands that talks to Flash... WPF... or another C++ app... and basically everything you can imagine. You can enable multitouch in any environment, like Cocoa."
High-resolution screen shots and additional information can be found on the nuiman website.
For my tech-minded readers: I'm pretty sure that the C++ application that track hands and fingers in the video demo uses Touchlib, a library for creating multi-touch interaction. Touchlib can work with TUIO, a protocol for tabletop tangible user interfaces. Applications such as Flash and Processing support TUIO. For more information about TUIO, read "TUIO: A Protocol for Table-Top Tangible User Interfaces". (Information from the NUI group website mentions that OpenCV, or Open Computer Vision Library, found on SourceForge, can support blog detection and tracking.)
The people behind TUIO are from the Reactable project, of the Music Technology Group at PompeuFabra University in Barcelona: Here is my plug for the NUI group, once again!
"The NUI group, or Natural User Interface Group, is an interactive media group researching and creating open source machine sensing techniques to benefit artistic and educational applications.
We offer a collaborative environment for developers that are interested in learning and sharing new HCI (Human Computer Interaction) methods and concepts. This may include topics such as: voice/handwriting/gesture recognition, touch computing, computer vision, and information visualization."
FYI I came across the Harry van derVeen of the NUI group in early 2007 when I was working on touch-screen projects for my HCI and Ubicomp classes, and I'm inspired by all of the creativity I've seen coming from this group.
If you'd like to see more demos, visit the Natural User Interface website, a commercial out-growth of Harry and his colleague's work, where you can view a reel that includes a few touch-screen games. I love the vision statement on this site:
"Technology should enable us to interact with computers, in the same way we interact with the real world; in a way which is natural to us, namely through gestures, expressions, movements, and manipulations. Our vision is to change the way people interact with computers."
