[Florian] sent a link to his proof of concept in creating a multitouch display using the Kinect. He’s the one behind the libTISCH multitouch package and that’s what he used to get this working along with the recently released Kinect drivers. He did this on an Ubuntu machine and, although it’s not a turnkey solution he was kind enough to share some rough directions on accomplishing it yourself. Join us after the break for his instructions and some embedded video.

Here’s what [Florian] said when we asked if he could walk us through how to replicate his work:

I’ll try, but it’s really a hack :-) You’ll need

- Ubuntu 10.10
- a Kinect (surprise :-)

- the OpenKinect driver from https://github.com/OpenKinect/openkinect
- go to directory openkinect/c/
- edit lib/CMakeLists.txt so it says “add_library (freenect SHARED ..”
- run “cmake .”
- run “make”

- the TISCH library, 1.1 branch
- svn co https://tisch.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/tisch/libtisch-1.1
- compile with something like:
CFLAGS=-I/foobar/openkinect/c/include \
LDFLAGS=”-L/foobar/openkinect/c/lib -lfreenect” \
make install
- go to the libtisch-1.1/build/bin directory
- run “export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=../lib/”
- run “./touchd -Vf”

- if it doesn’t work at first try, edit ~/.tisch.touchd
- in the line with the resolution (line 5), change to something like
“640 480 30 5 127 8 255 0″

- play with the ~/.tisch.touchd settings file (I’m aware it’s quite
horrible, the format is somewhat documented here:
http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/tisch/index.php?title=Touchd_config ).

Heh, now that I read that, I’m surprised it worked at all :-)

Florian

Your results may vary so please leave any tips you have on getting this up and running in the comments below.

Our fascination with multitouch is fairly well known, but it expands even further to cover all sorts of man machine interaction. Embedded above is a tech demo of g-speak, a spatial operating environment. The user combines gestures and spatial location to interact with on screen objects. If it seems familiar, it’s because one of the company’s founders advised on Minority Report. We doubt all this hand waving is going to catch on very quickly though. Our bet is on someone developing a multitouch Cintiq style device for people to use as a secondary monitor. It would bridge the gap between between our standard 2D interactions and gestures without making a full leap to 3D metaphors.

[via Create Digital Motion]