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.

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Portable Large Interactive Display

July 20, 2009 by Gerrit Coetzee 21 Comments

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/5452585%5D

[HyPe] over at the Natural User Interface Group developed this concept as part of his Master’s Degree in Industrial Design. This suitcase sized projector and computer allows people to have a 60″ multitouch screen available wherever there is a large enough surface. The current software is designed for ad-hoc meetings about large-scale construction plans. The rolling case includes a short-throw projector and webcam. Just set it on top of your work surface, lift the lid, and it’s ready to go.

IDisplay, Webcam Multitouch

June 26, 2009 by Eliot 32 Comments

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlLY0zic7u0%5D

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.

[via NUI Group]

Phototransistor Multitouch With A Twist

June 4, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 9 Comments

multitouch

[Alex] sent us this project he’s working on where he’s building a phototransistor based multitouch input system. Though many people have built systems with phototransistors, most of them are quite large and very sensitive light and dark variances. [Alex] has done some fancy background subtraction through software. He believes his is the first to do this. As you can see in the video after the break, it seems impervious to the lamp he is moving around, and still fairly sensitive to his hand. We’re curious to see where he takes this one.

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Google Summer Of Code 2009

March 25, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 5 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBRRR0BQyz0]

This year’s Google summer of code has been kicked off with a fairly substantial amount of participants. You can still submit an application until April 3rd, to join the roughly 2,500 “graduates”. For those who don’t know what it is, the Google summer of code pairs developing programmers with open source projects and funding. It’s a great program, resulting in advances in some programs that we follow. We’ve talked about several of the groups that will be participating this year, such as the NUI group, rockbox, openstreetmap, and videoLan.