Impress: Tactile Interface

February 12, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 13 Comments

impress

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]

Multitouch MAME Cabinet

December 24, 2008 by Caleb Kraft 19 Comments

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[rdagger] sent us this really well done multitouch MAME cabinet build. He ha penned to find a used, and fairly worn cocktail cabinet. The monitor was damaged, keys lost, and internals had been home to mice for some time. He promptly tore out the old guts, replaced the smelly mouse damaged base and began building the projection system. For touch sensing, he’s using a web cam with the IR filter removed to detect disturbances in some IR laser beams. We’re not completely clear on how he mounted the lasers, he skips over that part. There’s nothing groundbreaking in the technology here, we’ve done multitouch many times before. This project stands out in its execution. [rdagger] has done a fantastic job, the construction looks fantastic. Check out a video of it working after the break.

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Pen Based Input Improvements

December 21, 2008 by Eliot 10 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcE3XBytN-U]

Lately we’ve been focusing on multitouch technologies, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t interesting research going on in other areas of human-computer interaction. [Johnny Lee] posted a roundup of some the work that [Gonzalo Ramos] and others have done with pen based input. The video embedded above shows how pressure can be used to increase control precision. Have a look at his post to see how pen gestures can be used for seamless workspace sharing and how pen rolling can give additional control.