Spherical Multitouch Rig

October 15, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 9 Comments

We all love a little bit of multitouch, but we’ve seen so many setups that it is getting a bit less exciting. This one will get your attention with its unique shape. It is a spherical multitouch using all open source software. Well, since the poles are unusable, it might just be toroidal, or cylindrical, but it is still impressive. They are using a convex mirror mounted to the upper most point of the frosted sphere to reflect a projector mounted at the bottom of the base. A web cam pointed at that same mirror picks up reflected IR light from a few emitters. You can catch a video of it after the break.

Continue reading “Spherical Multitouch Rig” →

Microsoft Engineers Reinvent The Optimus Keyboard

August 20, 2010 by Mike Szczys 46 Comments

Looks like Microsoft has come up with a pretty slick little keyboard. It’s very much like the Optimus, which has an OLED screen in every key, except that it doesn’t have a screen in every key. Instead there’s just one screen on the whole unit and they keys have been overlayed on top while allowing the image to show through. Brilliant really, since this should drastically reduce the $2400 price tag of the original. That is, if you could buy the device. Microsoft’s not selling this hardware (yet anyway), but offering it up as test hardware for the UIST Innovation Contest. It will be interesting to see what the students come up with. This keyboard should be easier to program for since it involves manipulating just one screen. There is also extra space at the top that is touch-sensitive. See for yourself after the break.

Continue reading “Microsoft Engineers Reinvent The Optimus Keyboard” →

Light Bulb Form-factor Computer

August 2, 2010 by Mike Szczys 21 Comments

This computer can be mounted in any standard light bulb socket. It uses a pico projector combined with a camera to generate a touch display wherever you shine it. The photo above and the video after the break show the bulb in a motorized lamp arm but that’s just smoke and mirrors, the bulb itself is the core concept. We think there’s real potential for home-built versions. We’ve seen touch displays similar to this that mount on the side of a laptop, but why have the computer around at all? Ditch the USB connection for wireless and have it connect to your home server for processing power. It becomes a perfect solution for places that aren’t traditionally computer friendly. For instance, that kitchen computer you don’t want to touch with dough-encrusted hands becomes washable when the display is projected on a cutting board. Continue reading “Light Bulb Form-factor Computer” →

PIC Based Picture Frame

July 19, 2010 by Mike Szczys 29 Comments

Take a PIC 24HJ256GP206 processor and add a dash of knock-off touchscreen and a pinch of SD card compatibility for a DIY digital picture frame. [Daniel] wrote his own driver for the HX8347 controlled LCD that can achieve 15 FPS at 320×240 resolution with 16-bit color. As this was a gift for his wife, [Daniel] included a heart-shaped ring of LEDs that fade in and out like an electronic pulse. He notes that the JPEG decoder runs rather slow but that’s mostly because of the bottleneck caused when accessing data from the SD card. We’ve got more pictures and a link to the source code after the break.

Continue reading “PIC Based Picture Frame” →

Chess Table: Physical Interface For Internet Games

July 11, 2010 by Mike Szczys 15 Comments

Wanting to get back to playing with actual pieces, [Thomas Pototschnig] built a chess table that interfaces with the Internet. The table uses an custom setup to project the board on the frosted surface of the table. Chess moves from your internet opponent are displayed as arrows on the board so you can move the pieces. Your moves are detected by a webcam below the surface as this table actually functions as a multitouch display. From the description, it sounds like the projector was made from a 128×64 graphic LCD display. A 64×64 pixel area is used, with an LED below and a lens above. This works remarkably well. See for yourself after the break.

Want some other options for your chess setup? You can play against a robot arm, or if you’ve got 144 square feet of extra space you can build a really big board for the occasional game.

Continue reading “Chess Table: Physical Interface For Internet Games” →

Touch Screen Using Range Sensors

July 7, 2010 by Mike Szczys 17 Comments

This touch screen relies on measurements from two range finders to track your finger as you press buttons. [James Alliban] put this together as his first Arduino project. We’re familiar with [James’] background because of his informative augmented reality business card. As the Arduino picks up data from the range finder it sends it to a Flash script that is running on the PC.

As we watched the video after the break a lot of questions came to mind. What kind of angle do these Ping sensors have? Will there be interference problems if they were placed perpendicular with each other? Would you get more accurate data if they were not both on the top of the screen? For now this is just a preliminary experiment, but we like the concept and may give it a try ourselves.

Continue reading “Touch Screen Using Range Sensors” →

Multitouch Using Water

June 26, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 17 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuihQVRpRrQ]

[Taichi Inoue] is back again, this time with a multitouch system that uses water as the touch surface. The setup consists of a tank of water placed atop an LCD, a lamp, and a web cam. The web cam pics up the light that is reflected when something breaks the surface of the water. It is, as far as the computer is concerned, no different than the blob recognition we see with many of the home made multitouch systems. Mixed with his Yukikaze, this guy might end up with the most relaxing computer system in the world.

[via Makezine]