Yesterday i created this little flash application for use with my Multitouch(wip) screen.
I based my code on the “oh so” famous photo slide application. The tool is intended for use with “not existing” digital keyboard. It is possible to create a text and assign font, size and color. Once the sentence is added to the screen you are able to drag it around, rotate it and with a simple gesture change the letterspacing.

Here is a short quicktime movie showing the application in action, oh behold my fragile Multitouch screen setup.

On the screen you see the TypoTool with the Camera feed of my table on the left.

A few days ago i ordered a book about interaction design from bol.com.
It got delivered today.

I think it’s a good starting point in my research for my Multitouch project.

Designing interactions, by Bill Moggridge.

Let the research begin.

Today i did a little research in the field of using multiple webcams simultaneously.
I discovered that there are a lot of driver issues when you try to connect multiple webcams to a single computer. Logitech seems to have a solid driver systems and thus allowing to use multiple webcams simeltaneous. Because i dont own that many logitech cams i experimented with 3 different webcams.

Through processing i was able to identify the three webcams as different streams. The beautiful thing about processing : it is an easy programming language. Within a matter of minutes i created a little application which combined these three streams into a larger image and outputting it in a sequence of tiff images. I see a lot of possibilities for an upcoming project.

To be continued.

Besides working on my multi-touch setup i am researching the TUIO protocol. This protocol makes it possible to communicatie the positions from the multitouch screen to flash in order to develop interfaces. Right now i am studying some open source examples and trying to understand Actionscript 3.0. There is a lot changed in Actionscript 3 and it is completely OOP now so some study is required. Soon i will show the first results here.

To be continued.

After getting some weird blob results yesterday there is some progress today.
I was using the camera @ 640×480 mode but the touch screen was to close to the camera so one finger was relatively big for the blob detector. This caused the open blobs, today i placed the screen higher in my ghetto setup and i got a better result. The only problem that remains regarding the camera is the fact that it gives me a shaky image although i am selecting 30 fps. Got to look into that a bit.

Noise, lots of noise. And noise is a thing you dont want with vision controlled interfaces.
When i set my Fire-I to a resolution of 640×480 i get some open blobs instead of the round blobs i get at lower resolutions. Right now i think it has something to do with the amount of light i am using in combination with the higher detail at 640×480, but i’m not sure.

Lots of noise in the high pass filter resulting in open blobs

In the last week i’ve been ordering the parts needed for my own DI Multitouch screen.
I ordered the following items :

- Unibrain fire-i board cam, this is a 30 fps, 640 x 480 firewire camera.
- 640 x 480mm acrylic plate.
- 4x LT-0107 15 LED Infrared cluster.

Today i received all of these elements and i created a ghetto Multitouch setup.

The fire-i camera and a 4.3mm NON IR Lens

The LED Clusters which will light the screen

The ghetto setup

The first results, i am getting a grainy image from the camera which results in a difficult calibration.

To be continued..

I’m am starting this blog as a side work on my graduation project in which i will try to discover the possibilities of using a multitouch interface in the field of multi media design.

I honestly believe it’s just a matter of time until the first affordable screens will reach the market and starts invading our lives. Already Microsoft created the surface which is sold for 10.000 Euro. A price way too high for our homes but affordable for companies and public space, and that’s where most of us will meet for the first time with the multi touch screen.