This short YouTube video clip from Canine Interactive is a great demonstration of the multi-touch capabilities of the HP TouchSmart PC:
Canine Interactive is a design and development group located in central London. Their current and former clients include Alliance and Leicester,British Telecom, Verizon, and Microsoft.
He is another link to Canine Interaction's work on a multi-touch version of Monumental Adventure, featured in the above YouTube clip:
http://www.canineinteractive.com/design_monumental_touch_video.html
Oct 29, 2008
Oct 28, 2008
HP to launch TouchSmart Developer's Kit! via Rich Brown at CNET Crave's Blog
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.
If you go to the HP website, you can join the HP TouchSmart developer community.
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.
If you go to the HP website, you can join the HP TouchSmart developer community.
Oct 26, 2008
Grafiti - a multi-touch, table-top, surface computing application, from a member of the NUI group.
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.
According to De Nardi's Google Code website:
"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.)
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.
According to De Nardi's Google Code website:
"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.)
Oct 25, 2008
Multi-touch Parody of CNN's Magic Map Wall: Saturday Night Live's Weekend Update MegaPixel Giant Touch-map
Most viewers familiar with CNN news know about the "Multi-Touch Collaboration Wall", or Magic Wall, used by John King. David Borhman, a CNN producer, was describes the purpose of the Magic Wall in a quote in a Washington Post article:
"It's a stupendous way to explain a lot of complicated data"..."Fundamentally, our job is to explain things to people, and we need it visually. This lets us do it naturally, without a keyboard or mouse getting in the way....Once you see it, you get it instantly."
This would be fun to play with- for just about everyone! If you don't have ready access to a "magic wall", take a look Fred Armisen's playfulness in a recent Saturday Night Live parody of the CNN Magic wall:
Video clip via Hulu
Update: Transcript from the 2008 SNL Show
Partial Transcript:
"One thing we are going to look at is Pennsylvania..Have a very good look at Harrisburg.....Get in really close to this. Back a bit, back a little bit, excellent"
"Now the country can be moved up and down, like so....We can also shrink it and put it in your pocket if you need to."
"You can always change the colors. You got blue, blue again, a little bit of red...right over there, a little bit of blue of course, if you want to make something out of green, you got a little face there, some whiskers, we can ..... make a cat. Notice the triangle nose!"
"Let's look at Ohio. Lets look at the Cleveland area. Lets look really really close. Really close. Really really close, You can see the top of a warehouse. We're really going to want look at that. Very, very important, were going to want to look at that."
"You can take Oregon, lets move it out into the ocean. It will be completely surrounded by water. That's very, very dangerous."
"And here is New York.... New York was there in 2004, and you can shake it around like that.. (shakes New York)"
"Actually, what I'm doing is very important, and informational"
"OK, Fred, stop goofing around..."
Fred turns to the map, and with both hands, moves all of the states out of place.
Photo via engadget
"Check out Michigan... I can make it bounce!" (Drags down Michigan on the map, it bounces up and down once it reaches the bottom of the map.)
Rumor has it that Jeff Hans, of Perceptive Pixel, was responsible for the SNL version of the Magic Touch-Wall map.
Update 11/4/08:
CNN article confirms that Jeff Hans is the inventor behind the election 'Magic Wall'.
Jeff Han's 2006 demo of his multi-touch applications at TED.
Update
I thought I'd add the video clip that makes a little fun of Microsoft's Surface:
"It's a stupendous way to explain a lot of complicated data"..."Fundamentally, our job is to explain things to people, and we need it visually. This lets us do it naturally, without a keyboard or mouse getting in the way....Once you see it, you get it instantly."
This would be fun to play with- for just about everyone! If you don't have ready access to a "magic wall", take a look Fred Armisen's playfulness in a recent Saturday Night Live parody of the CNN Magic wall:
Video clip via Hulu
Update: Transcript from the 2008 SNL Show
Partial Transcript:
"One thing we are going to look at is Pennsylvania..Have a very good look at Harrisburg.....Get in really close to this. Back a bit, back a little bit, excellent"
"Now the country can be moved up and down, like so....We can also shrink it and put it in your pocket if you need to."
"You can always change the colors. You got blue, blue again, a little bit of red...right over there, a little bit of blue of course, if you want to make something out of green, you got a little face there, some whiskers, we can ..... make a cat. Notice the triangle nose!"
"Let's look at Ohio. Lets look at the Cleveland area. Lets look really really close. Really close. Really really close, You can see the top of a warehouse. We're really going to want look at that. Very, very important, were going to want to look at that."
"You can take Oregon, lets move it out into the ocean. It will be completely surrounded by water. That's very, very dangerous."
"And here is New York.... New York was there in 2004, and you can shake it around like that.. (shakes New York)"
"Actually, what I'm doing is very important, and informational"
"OK, Fred, stop goofing around..."
Fred turns to the map, and with both hands, moves all of the states out of place.
Photo via engadget
"Check out Michigan... I can make it bounce!" (Drags down Michigan on the map, it bounces up and down once it reaches the bottom of the map.)
Rumor has it that Jeff Hans, of Perceptive Pixel, was responsible for the SNL version of the Magic Touch-Wall map.
Update 11/4/08:
CNN article confirms that Jeff Hans is the inventor behind the election 'Magic Wall'.
Jeff Han's 2006 demo of his multi-touch applications at TED.
Update
I thought I'd add the video clip that makes a little fun of Microsoft's Surface:
Oct 22, 2008
A new kind of SmartBoard: Multi-User Multi-Touch SMART Table for Education
I heard a rumor a few months ago that this was coming...and it was true!
The SMART Table "Touch, Learn, Together"
"The SMART Table interactive learning center lets students get hands-on with collaborative activities – and the more hands the merrier. The SMART Table is a versatile learning center where groups of students can create, explore and discover together on the durable screen. The interface is so intuitive that even the youngest child can play games and plunge into learning activities in no time. You can choose from a wide variety of ready-to-go lesson activities, or customize them to suit your own lessons."
SMARTTablerelease
If you are interested in developing for the SMART Table, visit the SMART Table Developer site.
Here are some of my other posts about multi-touch, surface, and table-top computing:
Interactive Touch-Screen Technology, Participatory Design, and "Getting It".
Emerging Interactive Technologies, Emerging Interactions, and Emerging Form Factors
The atracTable Multi-Touch System from Atracsys
Time for More Touch! NASA's collaborative multi-touch table by Gesturetek and Inhanced Digital Corporation; HP touch-screen notebook; NextWindow
New multi-touch "Gravitoy" application from NUI; Multi-touch Space Invaders from Barcelona; "Open source" touch-less multi-touch SDK on CodePlex
Natural User Interface new website shares information about the company's innovative multi-touch solutions...
Time for More Touch! Part Two: Microsoft's "Oahu", a hypothetical (?), affordable version of the Surface multi-touch table..
Creative Programming: openFrameworks - AWESOME for interactive multimedia applications
Ideum's Multi-touch, Multi-user Prototype
bgC3: A new think tank for Microsoft's Bill Gates? via Todd Bishop and TechFlash
I'm on a Microsoft roll this week.
When I checked out a post by Marshall Kirkpatrick on the ReadWrite web today, noticed a link to an article about "Bill Gates' Mysterious new company", bgC3, writtten by Todd Bishop, co-founder and managing editor of TechFlash, and author of the Todd Bishop's Microsoft Blog.
I know that Gates predicts that every surface will one day be a computer. Maybe his new company will be addressing this concept behind the scenes?
"Federal trademark filings provide more clues – describing bgC3 as a think tank, under a generic trademark classification that corresponds broadly to areas including "scientific and technological services," "industrial analysis and research," and "design and development of computer hardware and software."...The “bg” is Bill Gates, the insider says, but the “C” stands for “catalyst.” The idea is that Gates will play that role as he brings together new people and ideas."
For more information about surface computing, read my previous post, "The Internet of Surfaces? Microsoft's Pete Thompson discusses screens and surfaces of all sizes"
If you've heard more about the focus bgC3 LLC, leave a comment!
When I checked out a post by Marshall Kirkpatrick on the ReadWrite web today, noticed a link to an article about "Bill Gates' Mysterious new company", bgC3, writtten by Todd Bishop, co-founder and managing editor of TechFlash, and author of the Todd Bishop's Microsoft Blog.
I know that Gates predicts that every surface will one day be a computer. Maybe his new company will be addressing this concept behind the scenes?
"Federal trademark filings provide more clues – describing bgC3 as a think tank, under a generic trademark classification that corresponds broadly to areas including "scientific and technological services," "industrial analysis and research," and "design and development of computer hardware and software."...The “bg” is Bill Gates, the insider says, but the “C” stands for “catalyst.” The idea is that Gates will play that role as he brings together new people and ideas."
For more information about surface computing, read my previous post, "The Internet of Surfaces? Microsoft's Pete Thompson discusses screens and surfaces of all sizes"
If you've heard more about the focus bgC3 LLC, leave a comment!
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