Comments on: tbeta, cross-platform multitouch

By: cme

cme — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 21:29:28 +0000

@pascal – The lag is not really caused by the software… but more-so the hardware limits such as projection delay and a 15 FPS camera compared to the 120 FPS a newer system supports see: http://nuigroup.com/forums/viewthread/2173/

By: murphy

murphy — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 19:32:06 +0000

Well, zero latency is impossible; there’s no such thing. Also, tbeta is much more efficient then touchlib, so the first poster must have been away from the touchlib scene for a while and not tested this new tbeta software. In tbeta, DSP is around 2-6 which means tracking speed between 166-500fps which is much higher than touchlib. 500ms wasted? Who said tbeta only supports flash? Not to mention, flash supports binary sockets, so this issue is null, if this integrated (which I believe it will be). There’s also many improvements in calibration and filters. If you’re judging latency by the video, it’s clear that tbeta isn’t the culprit of latency, but the webcam must be using lower fps (20-30). Any other tracker, touche, bbTouch, or “homebrew” will have the same results when using a low fps camera. If “zero latency”, which is something that is impossible, is more important than accuracy, then I’m scarred lol. I’d rather my touches touch the right parts of the screen and pick up my blobs than be fast and press wrong things on the screen and not pick up my fingers. Of course there’s flaws, but for a version 1, it’s much less flawed than other trackers I’ve seen.

By: Grovenstien

Grovenstien — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 11:08:15 +0000

Been following this for about a year now and have built my own touch drafting table! Personally i find Touche much better as a tracker, also BBtouch, but then again i am on os x. Tbeta has been the long awaited swiss army knife of trackers for multiple platforms. But the first post is right Zero latency is of upmost importance more so than accuracy. Check out open frameworks if you want to produce a homebrew!

By: Irishman

Irishman — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 03:41:09 +0000

That looks really sci-fi’esh, in a good way.

By: pascal

pascal — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 01:18:18 +0000

meh. the bad latency of touchlib actually got worse. that happens, when you use way too large trackers, send yourself UDP packets to a Java-server that converts it to XML which is then streamed to Flash, or whatever they do nowadays to waste these amazing 500msec…
that aside, easy access to lots of demos is cool, but when you really use it, go make your own integrated software. (it’s 50 lines of code at most, from image capture to a list of traces)
it’s easier to set up, and you can get just 1 frame (1/60secs) latency if you do it right (and when you use the system, you’ll notice soon, that low latency is way more important than high resolution or even very accurate tracking).