FlatFrog Multitouch Videos: Point Separation, Multi-input, Multi-user input

FlatFrog Multitouch is a company based in Sweden. It was founded by Ola Wassvic and Christer Fåhraeus.  The technologies support 20+ simultaneous touches, and recognize object size, a useful feature. FlatFrog screens can be optimized for a wide range of light conditions  FlatFrog's multi-touch and gesture interaction is featured in the short video clips below.  


FlatFrog is gearing up for commercial release. According to the FAQ's on the website, "all sizes are possible, from 5" to 100" and upward.  Promethean is one of the company's investors.   There is a volume manufacturing agreement with Kortek Corporation, known for industrial and gaming displays.




Thanks Touch User Interface for sharing this information! (Touch User Interface is the blog for Sensible UI, known for the ArduMT, aka the Arduino Multi-touch Development Kit)

Starbucks Cup Magic: Augmented Reality App for iPhone and Android!

The app was developed by Blast Radius.  FYI, Blast Radius is hiring.

"Blast Radius is a global agency that takes a strategic approach to tackling the complex issues of growing brand and revenue in a digitally connected world."


For more information, tak a look at the Starbucks Cup Magic iTunes preview.


Thanks to Ajit Jaokar for the link!

Revisiting Good Blogs: User Interface Engineering (Albrecht Schmidt, University of Stuttgart)

Albrecht Schmidt is a professor at the University of Stuttgart. His main interests include novel user interfaces and innovative applications for ubiquitous computing. His blog, Albrecht Schmidt - User Interface Engineering, serves as his note-pad, full of ideas, deep musings, and great links, including links to good scholarly papers. Below are a few of his posts:

Guests in my multimodal interaction class   
I'd love to take Dr. Schmidt's Multimodal Interaction class!  In this post, Albrecht highlights the presentations of  Nigel Davies, Marc Langheirich, and Rui Jose,  all members of the pd-net project.

Call for Papers:  Symposium on Pervasive Display Networks

Closing Keynote at AMI2011:  Beyond Ubicomp - Computing is Changing the Way we Live
(Pdf version - worth taking a look!)


Percom 2011 in Seatle, keynote


RELATED
PD-NET
"The PD-NET project aims to lay the scientific foundations for a new form of communications medium with the same potential impact on society as radio, television and the Internet. The goal is to explore the scientific challenges and to assess the new technologies required to enable the emergence of large scale networks of pervasive public displays and associated sensors. This display network will be designed and implemented to be open to applications and content from many sources and thus provide the foundation for work on a new global communications medium for information access and interaction." 


Note:  One of my interest is public displays in public spaces.  If you are interested, take a look at my Flicker collection, Ubiquitous Sightings of Urban Screens: Interactive Displays, Kiosks, and Digital Signage.

Revisiting Good Blogs: Eager Eyes (Robert Kosara, UNC-C)

Robert Kosara is a professor at UNC-Charlotte, responsible for opening my eyes to the world of information visualization and visual communication when I was a student in his graduate course a few years ago.  He is a deep thinker and his blog/website, Eager Eyes, is well worth taking the time to explore!


Here are some links to his posts:


You Only See Colors You Can Name "While color is a purely visual phenomenon, the way we see color is not only a matter of our visual systems.  It is well known that we are faster in telling colors apart that have different names, but do the names determine the colors or the colors the names? Recent work shows that language has a stronger influence than previously thought."

What is Visualization? A Definition

Understanding Pie Charts

Protovis Primer:  Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

Chart Junk Considered Useful After All

Six Niche Visualization Blogs

Linear vs. Quadratic Change

TWINE video and the Supermechanical Blog: Moving Toward the Web of People and Things!

"A wireless square with sensors and a simple web app to set rules, Twine tells you what your things are doing by email, text or Twitter."   I want one!

This project was developed by David Carr and John Kestener, the designer-engineers behind Supermechanical. They are passionate about creating connectable objects.They honed their skills in the interdisciplinary  MIT Media Lab.  


More information about Twine can be found on the KICKSTARTER website.  Here is a bite of info from the site for the tech-curious:

"Twine is a wireless module tightly integrated with a cloud-based service. The module has WiFi, on-board temperature and vibration sensors, and an expansion connector for other sensors. Power is supplied by the on-board mini USB or two AAA batteries (and Twine will email you when you need to change the batteries)."
"The Spool web app makes it simple to set up and monitor your Twines from a browser anywhere. You set rules to trigger messages — no programming needed. The rules are put together with a palette of available conditions and actions, and read like English: WHEN moisture sensor gets wet THEN tweet "The basement is flooding!" We'll get you started with a bunch of rule sets, and you can share rules you create with other Twine owners."
"Because the hardware and software are made for each other, setup is easy. There's nothing to install — just point Twine to your WiFi network. Sensors are immediately recognized by the web app when you plug them in, and it reflects what the sensors see in real time, which makes understanding and testing your rules easy."

RELATED

Supermechanical Blog

Revisiting Good Blogs: Nathan Yau's Flowing Data

One of my favorite blogs is FlowingData, Nathan Yau's labor of love for the past several years. Nathan is a UCLA PhD candidate in statistics with a focus in data visualization.  He shares interesting tidbits of information on his blog, including those that relate to his main interests, social data visualization, self-surveillance, and data for non-professionals.  He supports accessible and useful data visualization.


Nathan is the author of  the book, Visualize This: The FlowingData Guide to Design, Visualization, and Statistics,  nicely explained in the video below: