We just found this great portable multitouch rig called the portatouch. Made by a user at the NUI group website named [portatouch], this system uses a stripped down LCD as the display with IR LEDs edge lighting a touch surface in front of it. A camera mounted below the LCD picks up the reflections of the LEDs and converts it to touch points. While the implementation isn’t anything new, the package is really great. If you want to learn how to set up the technical side of it all, head over to the NUI group website and you’ll find all you want. We would love to see a more detailed breakdown of his rig though. The portability and quick construction are fantastic and seem like they could be reproduced without a ton of custom work.
We’re fans of pinch-zooming and that means multitouch. Although the interface is natively supported by both the hardware and operating systems of the Nexus One and Droid phones, it is locked out of the stock installation. You can make multitouch work on both handsets if you’re willing to do a little firmware alteration.
The coding has already been done for you, it’s a matter of loading a custom kernel. Both the Nexus One and the Droid have been rooted, and that’s what you’ll need to do to unlock multitouch with new firmware. In addition to gaining full access to the device OS, you’ll need to load up some different apps that support pinch zooming, etc. Luckily, these are readily available and you may like them better than the stock browser, maps, and photo applications.
The Misa Digital Guitar is a digital music controller like we haven’t seen before. The body, machined out of ABS, looks like a guitar. The player puts theirs hands in the same places you would on a guitar but the lack of strings make it something different.
The left had manipulates inputs in the form of 144 sensors, six in each of the twenty-four fret positions. The right hand doesn’t strum, but uses a multitouch screen to control the inputs. The UI looks solid, something you’ll have to see for yourself after the break. Tieing this all together is an AMD Geode processor running Gentoo Linux. That means this is open source and begging you to make it do your bidding.
Here, [Devlin] can be seen playing with a multitouch setup. We inspected it and found 4 lasers, located in the corners. We are pretty sure we have seen this exact setup before. There wasn’t really much of a booth there, so we played with the TV and then kept moving.
We also ran into a reader of Hack A Day and totally forgot to take his picture. Sorry man, if you run into us again, we’ll get you.
Subcycles is a sound controller application that [Christian] is using on the third multitouch display that he built. The screen is a sheet of acrylic in an aluminum frame. The image is rear projected onto an area covered with Digiline dispersion film. As with other projects that use the Community Core Vision package, a PS3 eye camera captures the touch information.
This build does a great job of including the audience in what the musician on stage is doing. [Chris] points out that the sight of artists staring at laptops on stage is becoming more and more common. The ‘Minority Report’-like interface that Subcycles uses makes not just for interesting music, but for an added visual reinforcement to the live part of the performance.
MIT is debuting their latest advancement in technology, a multitouch screen that also functions as a gestural interface. The multitouch aspect is nothing new, the team explains how traditional interfaces using LEDs or camera systems do work, but fail to recognize gestures off-screen.
Gestures are a relatively recent highlight with the introduction of projects like Natal or perspective tracking, but fail to work at closer distances to the screen. MIT has done what seems the impossible by combining and modifying the two to produce the first ever multitouch close proximity gestural display.
And to think, just a couple of months ago the same school was playing with pop-up books.
This looks like a fun little project. [Chris] has built a tank that he is controlling using his iPhone. Constructed mainly of off the shelf parts, like an Arduino and an Xbee wireless unit, the tank is controlled via processing. You can see that it is fairly responsive as he changes the speed of the motors. You don’t need an iPhone for this, really to do exactly what he’s doing any multi-touch input would work. You can download the code for it from his site.
We’re a bit curious about the solar charging. How much power does this use? Doesn’t that panel look a bit small? How long does it take to charge?
[Florian] is proud to announce libTISCH 1.0 is finally ready for release. We told you about libTISCH just under a year ago and how it is a multitouch framework that factors more on the software side of things, instead of hardware for multitouch interfaces. A lot has changed including more widgets, more gestures, more hardware support, and some other nice features. If you’re looking into making your own multitouch surface, or making your own widgets for a multitouch surface – libTISCH would be a great place to start.
