How do they do multi-touch without a Camera? Is it possible to use the IR sensors from a mouse (ball style) or laser light sensors (from LED mouse) or would they not be powerful enough?

Posted at 7:47 pm on May 20th, 2008 by Andrew

A lot of these hacks seem to revolve around total internal reflection inside acrylic pains. Since the Wiimote includes a camera + software to track 4 separate IR points at one time, how does its accuracy compare to that of the webcams? Will it pick up the light that comes off these things? Since its designed to track IR, wouldn’t it be less work than writing apps for webcams?

Posted at 8:35 pm on May 20th, 2008 by atrain

This is great!
I’d love to see this on my desktop one day for multitasking.
I think this could be the death of the mouse.

Posted at 8:55 pm on May 20th, 2008 by Alan

@atrain
Check out Johnny Chung Lee’s projects page at http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/projects/wii/ and scroll down to “Low-Cost Multi-point Interactive Whiteboards Using the Wiimote”. That should give you an idea of how well it works.

Posted at 9:54 pm on May 20th, 2008 by Mac Cody

i dont have any experence with software but i want to build an array of leds that suround the monitor. on set sending light the other reciving light. these leds would make a grid. as your finger breaks the light the grid calcuates the possition of your finger and uses it for the input. hard ware build is simple the concept is simple enough implimetation is the part i dont undersand. yet. any ideas??

Posted at 10:11 pm on May 20th, 2008 by camerin

Sure, I’ve seen johnny’s work. Thats what inspired my question.

Can the hacked cameras compare to a wiimote? If the cameras pick up an external light source, how sensitive will they be to it?

And finally: Why bother implementing big algorithms to track location when the wiimote has that built in? By freeing yourself from big fancy stuff like that, this stuff can eventually make its way into robotics and hobby electronics. All you need is a bluetooth enabled platform, a bit of code, and your ready to roll.

Posted at 11:02 pm on May 20th, 2008 by atrain

The hardware end seems to be on a good roll, but I haven’t seen that much software that supports muti-touch. there should be more detailed info about the software end.

Posted at 11:32 pm on May 20th, 2008 by Ptr

ptr:
Theres a few different libraries around. For example:
http://www.whitenoiseaudio.com/touchlib/

Posted at 11:55 pm on May 20th, 2008 by atrain

Software and development of these applications can be found on http://www.nuigroup.com which is also the new home of Touchlib from the post above. NUIGroup is a community of multitouch developers and natural user interface researchers. A great place to learn how to make software AND hardware for multitouch devices! =)

Posted at 12:45 am on May 21st, 2008 by crimsonred

@camerin: yes that’ll work but it’ll be *very* low-res, even with dozens of LED/detector pairs. I have an old Tektronix 1281 logic analyzer that uses that exact concept for its on-screen menuing. It does work, but not for multitouch, and not for any kind of decent resolution.

Posted at 11:02 am on May 21st, 2008 by andrew

The multi-touch display that I’ve played with (made by Enthought) had an IR camera and could track 50 points at a time through clever software. If tracking more than four points at once is important then a wiiMote just won’t cut it.

Posted at 12:26 pm on May 21st, 2008 by a random John

and say Microshaft spent billions in research for that and there is Open source solutions -sub 100$ material cost- working.
I don’t know how do they spend their money…

Posted at 3:34 pm on May 21st, 2008 by MaX-MoD

Microsoft spent it’s money coming up with a “high resolution” interface device (1280×960 according to wikipedia), developing a complete user interface including finished applications that interact with other devices, and marketing it. They also probably spent money on building an SDK so that other developers can write software for it, a hefty fee on legal services in order to avoid infringing patents (or at least to avoid the appearance of patent infringement), and I’m betting they also set aside a good chunk in case a lawsuit actually was filed.

I’m not saying it was a better expenditure of money, but they _did_ get started in 2001 and the extended development time probably added to the cost. Still, I highly doubt it adds up to “billions.”

I am curious about how the resolution of the open source products stand up against Microsoft and Apple. A little healthy competition might force them to turn their respective technologies into more than just expensive, and fairly frivolous, toys.

I’m going to go hide from the impending fan-boy attacks now.

Posted at 8:06 pm on May 21st, 2008 by Damion Fury

@8 what no fps?

Posted at 6:13 pm on May 23rd, 2008 by Eric