This is the final setup. Very much under construction though. But the industrial look remains the same.

Rock on.

Today also the mirror arrived in the mail. This mirror is a Polystyrene mirror which means that you can bend it, like a laugh mirror, which is not that funny for accurate vision. Also this mirror has the reflective layer as front surface which means i wont get any double reflections, i hope. I wil test it later. If everything fails i can stil make a nice Barbie House from it.

Finally i received my Lee Filters in the mail today. This filter is used for projecten and touch surface, its a sort of plastic so dirty fingers and wet fingers are less of a problem instead of vellum.

I found an awesome overview of multitouch techniques from 1982 up to the iPhone. I already knew that the multiouch principle was not a new thing, but this overview helps me understand how it evolved in the years. A nice fact is that the quite famous “pinch” gesture, for transforming pictures on a multitouch setup was already created in 1992. I thought it was Jeff Han who invented that gesture, but no. Eveything has be done before.

Bill Buxton Multitouch overview

Finally i made a drawing, with this drawing the fabrication phase of the multitouch setup has started.

Finally i found the correct angle in which i dont have to use digital keystone correction. By placing the projector almost vertical and the mirror tilted a few degrees i got a perfect non keystoned image. A different thing i saw was the ghosting in the image caused by the normal mirror i am using. To reflect a projector image you actually need a front surface mirror. This is a mirror without the glass in front of it, the glass causes a first reflection and the mirror layer another reflection. Two reflections is not good.

But front surface mirrors are expensive. Luckily i found something called “Polystyrene mirror” this is a form of plastic with a reflective layer on top. The representative of the company told me that it has almost the same reflective capabilities as normal mirrors. Only you have to be aware that the mirror is placed straight and not bend because the plastic is only 1.5 mm resulting in a bendable mirror.

Now i wait till i receive the mirror, laugh mirror house coming soon….

Finally after a few days of reading reviews i found the ultimate candidate. A short throw range, 102 cm for a 64 x 48 cm image. A resolution of 1024 x 768 and very cheap, a occasion with only 700 hours on the lamp. This projector is powered by MK2 and the projector powers the multitouch, invisible fundamental connections.

Today i managed to nearly destroy my Unibrain Fire-I Board Camera.
My ghetto style setup was too ghetto and collapsed, causing the acrylic to crash on my camera. I was terrified by the idea that i broke a 100 Euro camera but it is still working, the only scar is a 20 pixel less bright column in my video output. But it doesn’t influence the blob tracking. As far as i can see for now.

Take care.

Finally i was able to understand the code of the gesture recognition script from Bytearray, and was able to implement it in a new package for use with the TUIO system. Concluding that i am now able to use Gestures in my touch interface. Right now i am still working on a method to connect actions to a currently selected item in combination with a gesture. This wil give lots of opportunities.

Below is a short low res quicktime movie in which you see my finger making gestures and the system recognizing it. The yellow dot is a dummy object for a soon to come menu. As soon as the gesture is made, the center of the gesture is calculated and the dot is placed at this x and y position.

In 1992 Bruce Tognazzini launched a project while working at Sun Microsystems. The project was aimed at predicting and guiding the future of computing, the form was a movie. A team of designers, futurists and engineers made this movie : Starfire

Although the movie name sounds like a bad sciencefiction movie the ideas proposed in the movie are very serious. Take notice of the fact that the lady in the movie has a Multitouch interface with a horizontal and a vertical area. In terms of usability you don’t want to lift your arms for longer than an hour, so a Minority report kind of vertical setup is funky but not very usable for hours in a row.