Cross Post: One Laptop Per Child's Redesign- Dual Touchscreens, Flexibile Use

Photo from One Laptop per Child via MIT Technology Review

"Hundred-dollar laptop, revisited: The next-generation version of the One Laptop per Child machine will dispense with keypads. It can be folded flat to make one larger screen (left); here, two children could play a game, each using the touch-screen capability. Or it can be held on its side and used as an electronic book (right)."

I'm impressed with the new design of the OLPC, the dual touch screen, the support of collaboration and sharing between children, and the flexibility it will provide educators and students. It can even be used as an e-Book! This laptop would be welcomed in UDL classrooms.

For detailed information about the new OLPC laptop, which has not yet been released, read David Talbot's article in the MIT Technology Review.

I want one.

NUI-Group Member Bridger Maxwell Receives High School Science Fair Award for Multi-Touch Screen Project

Yet another post about a NUI group member... Bridger Maxwell, a high school student at the Utah County Academy of Sciences, submitted his multi-touch screen to the science fair, and went on to win first place in the engineering category, and now will be competing in the International Science and Engineering Fair.





Bridger has created "Lumen", a puzzle game for OSX and Windows, and markets this through his business, Fiery Ferret.

Even More Multi-Touch, Delivered by NUI...

May 20, 2008
NUI announces delivery of their multi-touch solution for Cityscape, Abu Dhabi 2008





www.natural-ui.com
Natural User Interface Europe Ltd.

More Multi-Touch from members of the NUI group!

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 Lux open-source framework. (Christian is a colleague of Harry van der Veen, 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 Pompeu Fabra 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 der Veen 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."

Multi-touch Crayon Physics

Also posted on the TSHWI blog:
Watch how you can draw simple shapes that can instantly turn into a game!


Multitouch Crayon Physics from multitouch-barcelona on Vimeo.
For a better version of this video, see http://www.vimeo.com/980528 For more information, see the RXSurface blog post. On May 18, Multi touch crayon physics will be offered as an alphabeta opensource! The people behind RXSurface are members of the Natural User Interface (NUI) group:
"Natural User Interface or ~ NUI Group is an interactive media group researching and creating open source machine sensing techniques to benefit artistic and educational applications."

Virtual Math Museum: Online Math Art:

The Virtual Math Museum has a wealth of visual information useful to those in and outside the field of math. The mathmatical art section has links to the works of Paul Nylander, George Hart, Titia van Beugen, Brian Johnston, Bathsheba Grossman, Jos Leys, Paul Bourke, Jean Consant, and Luc Benard.

Each of the Math Artist pages provides information about the artist that in my opinion, would be useful to teachers who aim to encourage students to consider pursuing STEM-related careers. (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math).

The content of the entire Virtual Math Museum website is impressive on a large display or interactive whiteboard!


FYI:

"3D-XplorMath Home Page

The group in charge of the 3D-XplorMath software development project and the related Virtual Mathematics Museum website project is the 3DXM Consortium, an international volunteer group of mathematicians. The Consortium gratefully acknowledges ongoing support for these projects by The National Science Foundation (DUE Award #0514781) and is grateful to the Mathematics Department of The University of California at Irvine for hosting the 3D-XplorMath and Virtual Mathematical Museum websites."