Multigesture.net

NUI Book

To help out fellow multi-touch users and developers, the NUI Group community decided to create a book sharing information about multi-touch technologies. Originally we intended to release this book during the IDC2009, unfortunately we were only able to finish a concept version. This concept version was available at the NUI Group booth.

NUI Group press release:

“We are proud to announce the release of the first edition of the NUI Group Community Book – “Multi-Touch Technologies”. This book comprises state of the art articles from our Community Wiki, as well as several chapters written by leading experts in the field specifically for this publication. Detailing basic hardware technologies as well as the process of developing software suited for multi-touch systems, this book provides a technical introduction to the world of multi-touch.

This book aims to provide an introduction to the multi-touch world for all backgrounds of people, and also include sufficient information to serve as a general “handbook” for those acquainted with the field, including code examples, suppliers, and building methodology.

Multi-Touch Technologies is a unique publication in its domain in that it is released at no charge under the Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution Share-Alike license – all content found in this book is free to be re-distributed and modified under a similar license, with attribution.”

View the full press release.
Download your copy here: First_Edition_Community_Release.pdf

Comments and suggestions can be posted in the feedback topic @ NUI Group forums.

* update 15 July *
Mirror of the NUI Book:
English version
Chinese version (special thanks to Kelvin / mt2a for translating the book, feedback can be posted here).

Google Summer of Code 2009

Like last year, the NUI Group will be coaching students to work on open source multi-touch projects. This year, I will be helping out by mentoring a student who will add hand tracking to Community Core Vision (formally known as tBeta).

Project: Recognition, Tracking and Association of Hands, Fingers, and Blobs: A Community Core Upgrade
Student: Thiago de Freitas Oliveira Araújo
Mentor: Laurence Muller

Follow his progress on his blog and his code on nuicode or google code.

Hand/Fingers occlusion testcase

Matching a hand model (using Active Appearance Models)

More videos can be found here.

Watch it in HD on Youtube or Vimeo!

Changelog for v3:

• Fixed compatibility issue with Adobe AIR 1.5 (Fullscreen bug)
• This version should autodetect your screensize to support any screen resolution.
• Added a Google Maps object
• Added support for adding pictures on the fly (for example if you want send a picture from your cellphone with bluetooth, read the readme.txt for the instructions)
• Added a exit-button, reset view-button, canvaslock and displaylock buttons.
• Temporary removed DCIM support due to slowdowns

Want to try it out yourself?
Download it now: Multitouch Media Application Pro v3 (5726) - 2.25 MB

Please read the install instructions in readme.txt (and download the latest Adobe AIR 1.5.x).

note: If you want to try out the bluetooth feature, I recommend installing BlueSoleil to handle the pairing of the devices and file transfers.

It has been a while since my last blog post, so I will try to catch up a bit.

Earlier this year, Chris Moore invited me to join the Interactive Displays Conference 2009 (IDC) in San Jose, CA, USA. The IDC is an event for hardware manufacturers, developers, researchers and end user of interactive display technologies. The event was organized by pira-international and supported with great keynote speakers: Jeff Han from Perceptive Pixels and Andy Wilson & Steven Bathiche from Microsoft Research.

The NUI Group was also present with a booth to demonstrate some of the current activities from the community. Key members (Seth Sandler, Chris Moore, Alex Popovich, Jimmy Hertz and Thomas Hansen (Author of PyMT) ) from the NUI Group community and NUI INC. where present to demonstrate their hardware and software achievements.

Jimmy Hertz presented his amazing and huge H2O AquaTouch Water Screen at the booth. Alex Popovich demonstrated his multi-camera solution based on custom drivers created for the PS3.

Jimmy setting up his touch screen

The NUI Group booth (with free NUI Group T-shirts!)

Alex’s multicamera solution with 3 PS3 cameras

A nice summary of the conference can found on the NUI Group blog. More photos can be found on the Flickr streams from Joan Woodbrey and Thomas Hansen

Seth, Justin and me heading to the car.

Photograph credits: Thomas Hansen

I would like to thank Chris and the other present NUI Group members for this amazing event, I really enjoyed my stay in San Jose and San Francisco.