Stantum’s High Precision Multitouch

February 19, 2009 by Eliot 9 Comments

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We love keeping track of new interaction technologies and this new touchscreen by Stantum looks especially promising. Engadget shot a hands-on video with it at the Mobile World Conference. It’s a resistive screen, so it can be used with both fingers and styluses (unlike capacitive screens). It’s sensitive enough that you could use a brush too. The screen supports any number of multitouch points and does pressure sensing based on the size of the detected fingertip. The touch detection is actually more accurate than the screen can display. Stantum is hoping mobile manufactures will pick up their input framework for inclusion in new devices. The resistive touchscreen was built to Stantum’s specifications (it won’t work with current phones), but they say it wouldn’t be hard to go into mass production.

Rear Projection TV Multitouch

February 15, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 14 Comments

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[Dave] sent us these fantastic instructions on how to hack a rear projection tv to be a multitouch interface. They’ve converted a 67″ inch TV by adding a couple of PS3 eye cameras and an infrared laser plane. There’s lots of great information, like how to replace the lenses on the PS3 eye cameras and how to create the custom fittings needed to make it all fit nicely. You can download the code, but it is Mac only. They claim that this is the first conversion of a commercial rear projection TV to multitouch, but we know better. You can see a video of it in action after the break.

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Impress: Tactile Interface

February 12, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 13 Comments

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Touch screen interfaces are generally hard and flat. Impress tries to break from that tradition by making the display flexible. Allowing you to feel more like you are interacting with the display. In the image above, the circles seem to physically fall into the dent made by your fingers. Another application shows some rudimentary 3d modeling being done by physically pushing on the vertexes. This prototype is very interesting, we’d love to see much higher resolution on the input side of things. It states that it does pressure sensitivity, but we weren’t able to distinguish it in the video. Maybe you can, catch the video after the break. Maybe laying one of these on some foam would be another alternative.

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Plexi Cliffhanger For Trackmate

February 8, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 1 Comment

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If you’ve ever wanted to play with tangible tracking systems quick and cheap, you might be interested in this super quick tracking surface for trackmate. Trackmate is open source software for physical object tracking. Making a surface for it isn’t that hard in the first place but this one is probably the easiest. All you really need is some Plexiglas, some c-clamps and a web cam. The whole thing packs into a backpack or over the shoulder bag. This would be perfect for live performances.

Multitouch Tabletop Gaming

January 18, 2009 by Eliot 29 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QflrIK-m4Ts]

Reader [Ramon Viladomat] sent in what he has been working on over the last year at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. Tired of see nothing but zooming map demos, he created a roleplaying game that takes advantage of the reacTable‘s multitouch interface. Along with multitouch, the reacTable also uses tangible fiducial markers to represent objects and as an alternative input method. Embedded above is a video demoing the interface and gameplay (starts at 3:43). The game lets you move your miniature through a virtual world. The surface shows you how far you can move dynamically as your action points regenerate and slowly reveals more dungeon as you discover it. You can pause the action and use gestures to set attack patterns. We really like this demo and would love to see someone build one using a popular tabletop game like Warhammer 40K. Embedded below is a demo of the associated map editor.

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Multitouch Patched Into Android

January 13, 2009 by Eliot 16 Comments

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[Luke Hutchison] has come up with a rather clever hack to get multitouch support on the G1. He wrote a patch against the Synaptics touchscreen driver. When two fingers are placed, the driver reports the x/y of the midpoint and a radius for the size field. If only one finger is used, the size is reported as zero. The nice thing about this approach is that it’s backwards compatible; the extra data will be ignored by current apps. Unfortunately, Google’s Android team says that if multitouch is ever added, it would identify individual fingers and definitely not using this method.

[via ABN]

[photo: tnkgrl]

Passive Multidimensional Input

December 29, 2008 by Nick Caiello 15 Comments

[vimeo 2433260]

Any musician who has ever used a computer to create music will tell you that while this technology is more than capable of producing great music, it is always a much more intimate experience to create by physically playing an instrument. In an effort to bridge this gap, [Randall Jones] has built a passive multidimensional interface that uses multitouch input to create an intimate experience that rivals that of a traditional musical instrument. While this concept may seem very complicated, the interface is made of only copper strips, rubber, and wood. At $50, this interface was designed to be inexpensive and appears to be very easy to use. As seen in the video, this interface can be used as anything from a drum to a multitouch synthesizer.

[via Make]