Various multi-touch and natural-user interface/interaction companies have been collaborating, and results are promising.
Here is the result of a collaboration between 3M and NUITEQ, the company based in Sweden:
3M Multi-Touch &; NUITEQ Suite Software Video
In this video, you'll see SnowFlake software used in a variety of contexts, such as education, architecture, health, financial consultation, product browsing, games, playing with special effects, and more.
What a difference since 2007, when I shared what I was doing in my graduate classes on this blog!
This is a company I've been meaning to write about! Here is the plug from the IntuiLab website:
"Founded in 2002 and headquartered in Toulouse, France, IntuiLab is a leader in the design and development of surface computing-based applications. Through IntuiFace, the company’s portable, scalable and extensible software surface computing platform, IntuiLab delivers and deploys applications that bring tangible returns on investment to its clients by providing their customers and users with a more natural, immersive and memorable interactive experience. IntuiLab is a Microsoft and Adobe partner and has clients in a wide variety of industries such as retail, food and health, banking, aerospace and defense, telecoms and hospitality."
"We are able to deliver such benefits to our customers thanks to a unique blend of skills (our multidisciplinary IntuiTeam), technology (the IntuiFace Surface Computing Software Platform), process (the IntuiSign design process) and a wide range of partners."
Amazon Multi-touch Clinet on the IntuiFace Platform
"This video shows an example of how to access to an online retail catalogue (such as Amazon) from a Surface Computer rich client, and create, browse and merge lists of queried or selected items in a natural way." -Intuilabs
Multi-user Web Browsing on a Windows 7-based 19" 3M Multi-touch
Pictures from the Intuilab website:
If you take a look at Intuilab's "the team" page, you'll find that they look like...graduate students! They probably are, or were, given the size of list of published papers. This tells me that they must have their heart, mind, and souls poured into the business!
According to Priya Ganapati's recent article in WIRED, only 3% of all PC's and notebooks have interactive touchscreens. More are coming to market, such as Sony's Vaio L Touch HD PC, Dell's all-in-one, and Lenovo's tablet PC and ThinkPad laptop. HP came out with the TouchSmart PC and touch-enabled laptops, and will be adding updated versions soon.
This is a great opportunity for developers interested in touch, multi-touch, and gesture interaction applications. I think there will be even more opportunity for web developers to create websites that are touch-enabled, or at least optimized for touch screen interaction.
Will the multi-touch web might be right around the corner?
At the moment, there is some confusion about what designers should consider when developing applications. There is not standard system of touch or gesture interaction, and researchers are still very busy figuring things out. Some companies have rushed out and patented gestures, which in my opinion, is like patenting how we breath. But that is another story.
If you are a designer or developer, you might be interested in the Touch First Microsoft Surface Developer Challenge. It is a chance to win your very own Microsoft Surface! Hurry, the deadline is October 12th.
If you are curious and would like to dig deeper into this topic, take some time to look at some of my blog-posts about multi-touch, touch screen news, innovations, and related musings:
How it works: Information from a true case, from the Virtual Autopsy Table website. "A living patient was treated for cerebral hemorrhaging. X-rays sent through the body during computed tomography grow weaker according to the density of the tissue through which they pass. By assigning density values with varying degrees of transparency and identifying colors, a sort of palette can be created by the computer to use in the imaging process. It becomes possible, for example, to remove clothing, skin or blood vessels. In this case the patient has been operated for a ruptured aneurysm in a small brain vessel. A metal clips has been added that can be seen in the image. "
RELATED
The Norrkopings Visualization Center "The installation is financed within the framework of the Visualization program and developed by Norrköping Vi sualization Center in cooperation with CMIV (Center for Medical Image Science and Visualization)."
Art & & Code is an event series and online community dedicated to the democratization of computer programming for artists, young people, and the rest of us.
This November 6-8, we continue our successful workshop/lecture series with MOBILE ART & & CODE: Mobile Media and Interactive Arts - a symposium on the aesthetic and tactical potentials of mobile, networked and locative media. The three-day event will feature intimate, practical, arts-oriented programming workshops for popular mobile platforms (such as the iPhone, Android, Nokia Smartphones, Arduino, SMS, and Asterisk PBX systems) along with an all-day series of free lecture presentations that contextualizes the use of these technologies in a variety of contemporary critical, artistic and design practices.
MOBILE ART && CODE is a symposium on the artistic and tactical potential of mobile, networked and locative media: November 6-8, 2009 at CMU!
Conference Schedule 6 Nov (Fri): Three-Hour Workshops, 9am-Noon and 2pm-5pm ($75/ea.) 7 Nov (Sat): Free All-Day Artist Presentations + Evening Performances 8 Nov (Sun): Three-Hour Workshops, 9am-Noon and 2pm-5pm ($75/ea.)
Some of the workshops do not require any programming experience, and only two (iPhone + OpenFrameworks and Android + Arduino) recommend that participants have some programming experience.
SoTouch and onedotzero collaborated to create a multi-touch, multi-user application that ran on a Mindstorm Aurora table at the onedotzero Adventures in Motion Festival at the BFI Southbank in London during in September 2009. The interactive application provided festival participants enjoyable ways to filter and search the festival program. The art director for this project was Alex Le Guillou.
(Music: Raindrops, by Basement Jaxx)
How it works
How does it work?
According to information provided by So Touch, users can search by dragging and dropping keywords in personal search discs. Physics rules incorporated into the SoTouch application allow the manipulated objects bump and react to each other, encouraging social interaction among the people at the table. For this particular application, each even could be viewed in a description panel, including timing, description, pictures, and videos, enabled for multi-touch gesture interaction. Additionally, people could use the table to send emails to friends, using a scalable keyboard.
The application was designed for flexibility, using the TUIO protocol, and allowing it to be customized for use at other festivals or shows through xml.
Detail
About SoTouch "Intelligent Surfaces" "We deliver complete solutions to turn passive environment into active business contributor in retail, show room and trade show, leveraging multi-touch and touch-less technology."
Julien Lescure, CEO, and Florian Bernard, CTO, founded SoTouch, an advanced digital agency, in early 2009. The company is based in the U.K.
About onedotzero "Onedotzero is a contemporary, digital arts organisation with a remit to promote innovation across all forms of moving image and motion arts, activities encompass public events, artist + content development, publishing projects, education, production, creative direction, and related consultancy services ... onedotzero was conceived at the start of the desktop digital revolution in the mid-1990s out of a desire to explore moving image across single screen, interactive and live audio-visual work. today, onedotzero remains committed to providing a home for visionary moving image experimentation and contemporary creative collisions."
Interactive Urban Screen
The interactive urban screen installation, also known as the 2009 onedotzero identity, was made interactive by a Nokia n900 mobile phone, as shown in the pictures and video clips below.
Nokia n900 onedotzero Installation- Behind the Scenes
Onedotzero - Watch the interaction with an urban screen with a Nokia n900 (Story behind the scenes story).
RELATED N900 to appear in London next week! (JBC, Nokia Conversations, 9/4/009)
According to the article, the application for the installation was developed by digital artists/computational designers Karsten Schmidt and Gary Birkett. (I think the ad agency Wieden + Kennedy London was also involved with this project, since Nokia is their client.)
