Multigesture.net

I’ve posted two Howto’s on compiling touchlib in Windows (XP and Vista) and Linux (Ubuntu).

Howto: Compile Touchlib in Windows
Howto: Compile Touchlib in Linux

Both compile instructions apply to subversion rev.73 of touchlib. If you followed the Howto’s and still have some trouble please post the problem in the comment section.

I have made a special version of MMA which uses the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) technology.

It now supports adding images on-fly. Just connect your digital camera by using your usb transfer cable (or if you have a memorycard reader that would be even better) and all your images will be downloaded to the multitouch desktop. Your camera should be using the DCIM standard).

Since the Pro version is using Adobe AIR it is no longer needed to perform a special trick to get the filelists of the videos and images. Please read the readme.txt for more information.

To run the application it is required to download the runtime enviroment, at this moment only versions for Windows and MacOS computers are available. A Linux version should be available next year.

Download:
Multitouch Media Application Pro v2a
Adobe AIR - required

Yesterday I looked into (ab)using google maps to use with the MMA.

Because I did not felt like implementing an entire tile engine myself I looked around on Google and found this actionscript project: Google Maps API opensource. However this looked kinda complex to me so I started to look for an alternative.

While chatting in #nuigroup, c.moore told me that he was trying to create something like that as well. He recommended too look into ModestMaps.

Unfortunately it was not just a matter of including a few class and adding it the to the stage. Besides adding google maps, controlling google maps would be a problem too. As you probably know it is possible to scale and rotate the desktop with 2 fingertips, but this is also true for the border of Google maps and it would also be true for the Google maps layer itself. This would mean 3 layers of scaling and rotating.

Instead of trying to implement a smooth browsing Google maps object, I created a new actionscript class called GoogleMapsSimple instead.
This class basically allows you to browse the tiles in the way as Google has cut them (at different zoom levels). There are not that many sites which explain how you can collect satellite or vector images from Google maps, however the few I could find were pretty useful ( sources: #1 / #2 / #3 )

When building an application based on the Google maps data you should consider building a caching service as well. While I was testing out my GoogleMapsSimple class I got banned from the server, because it looked like an automated system requesting the same tiles over and over again. To solve this problem I made a caching service in PHP. Instead of connecting my flash application to Google it would now request a tile from my own server. The caching service would then check if it has a local copy available, if it has one it sends the local copy, otherwise it would randomly select one of the four Google maps servers and request the tile.

Below you find two images of the GoogleMapsSimple objects. The interaction modes on these objects are pretty primitive. The corners allow you to zoom in according the way Google has cut the tiles. The center button allows you to zoom out and the other buttons allow you to move north, south, east and west.

Any release?
Uhm no, because the caching service sometimes fails in acquiring the tile (even after a few retries) I am not releasing the new MMA yet. But don’t worry it will be here soon enough …

Last weekend I code a keyboard in actionscript and added it to the Multitouch Media Application. At this moment you will only be able to type text into the yellow square. Due some bug in touchlib/TUIO the shift button won’t be released when you release the shift button physically. Use the shift_up button to ‘release’.

- Have fun with thisone!

*update 18-09-2007*
Yesterdays release had some bugs on rotation (only the onscreenkeyboard and the notepad), v2a solves this issue. v2a now allows to rotate and scale the entire surface aswell. Usage: get v2 and put the v2a version in the same directory. You might want to edit the *.bat files to the filenames of v2a.

Download:
Multitouch Media Application v2
Multitouch Media Application v2a - *update*

To install v2a:
Download v2 and unpack it to a directory. Download v2a and place the binaries in the directory of v2.

Since the start of my project, I wanted to do a multi-touch media application which could be used for organizing photos and videos. I started my first attempts with using the languages C++ and OpenGL. However this was more difficult and more time consuming than I hoped for.

Fortunately Whitenoise already had created a basic photo organizer in Flash. The only problem was that it was using images from the popular photo site Flickr. Because I prefer to keep the content local (so I can moderate the content being displayed), I first modified the actionscript files of the FlickPhoto application to read local data.

Surprisingly it was not difficult to extend the project and I implemented a few extra classes to get the videoplayer working. A few examples images can be found below. Because this application is running in Flash you should use osc.exe and the FLOsc proxy. Of course you can use your own images and video with this application. However video files need to be converted to FLV. Please consult the readme.txt of the zip file package for more information.

- Enjoy!

Download:
Multitouch Media Application v0.1

* update 14 sept. 2007 *
My new lens arrived today so I could finally test my table (DI)!

Photos:

Youtube movie: