[Kyle McDonald] had a Visioneer XP 100 portable scanner laying around, so he started trying to come up with alternative uses for it. In the video above, we can see a multitouch setup rigged together using Openframeworks in Ubuntu. As you can see in the video, there’s some considerable lag. That is due to the 250-500 ms of buffering built into the scanner. It does have nice resolution; 10k pixels wide at 60 fps, so it has to be useful for something (aside from scanning). Anyone got any ideas? He says if the field of view was wider, he’d use it on a river bed to watch fish.
[Kyle McDonald] sent in his latest project, a software keylogger that twitters what you type. He wrote it using C++ and OpenFrameworks. It logs each keystroke, then it posts to twitter 140 characters at a time. To protect himself, he set up a whitelist of private strings like passwords and credit card numbers that would be stripped before posting. If the twypewriter followed him, his keystrokes could be recreated.
Embedded above is an interesting multitouch demo by [Lahiru]. The goal of the project was to find an easy way to retrofit current LCDs for multitouch. Instead of using infrared or capacitive recognition, it uses a standard webcam mounted overhead. To calibrate, you draw polygon around the desktop screen as the webcam sees it. The camera can identify the location of markers placed on the screen and their color. iDisplay can also recognize hands making the pinch motion and sends these as touch events via TUIO, so it works with existing touch software. It’s written in C++ using OpenCV for image processing with openFrameworks as the application framework.
NOR_/D has just released their newest multitouch display system. The TouchKit Spark features a larger 35.4×23inch display surface than its predecessor, the Run. It uses ultrabright IR LEDs around the screen’s border for FTIR multitouch sensing. A high frame per second IR camera is included to increase tracking performance. The screen is fully assembled, but you need to provide your own projector and case. It can be built at table height or as low as 20inches. The device is designed to work with OpenFrameworks, but future software releases will have TUIO support.
