It has been a while since I finally sat down and wrote something. Partially because of being busy, but more about procrastination. The nearing close of the winter season has me itching for the seasonal chance, and yet whenever I get rolling on working on projects, I end up working in the basement anyways (it is difficult to setup a tower and 2 monitors out in a cafe or bar). I'm losing my train of thought, but what has been going on here anyways lately.
I want to first thank Shark&Minnow the opportunity to talk in front of the people of my fair city, Cleveland OH. And talk about open source, mutltitouch technology and be able to demo my newest table prototype. Read the rest of this entry »
So this is a long time coming. Many months ago I decided I wanted to try using capacitive foil.
After searching around for a while, I decided to try the Visual Planer's Interactive Foil. I found the local distributor for the US at Brookview Technologies. My sales contact there has been very helpful through the whole selling and shipping process. To build a good size prototype, I decided to go with the 50" 16:9 display.
So now I have the foil in hand, but nothing to attach it to. Time to put a call into my acrylic supplier, they also have a CNC machine so cutting the 1/2 acrylic to the exact size was a piece of cake. And the last bit of the puzzle was how to display the acrylic.
I've been working with Robeck Fluid Power Co. in Aurora OH. Another outstanding group when it comes to customer service and capabilities. I contracted them to build a display stand out of aluminum railing so that 1. it could be collapsible and easy to transport and 2. be able to change orientation between a vertical and horizontal display.
I've been working with the Touchlib library of multi-touch apps using Actionscript 3.0 to develop some of my own apps. This driving force behind what I've been doing is to get a general idea of how to start thinking about the code, and try to discern what works well and what does not. I began with making a simple interface to select an app to be dynamically loaded into the main flash movie. The buttons and information is built dynamically and after an app is selected a trigger is placed in the bottom right corner the user will need to hold down to being back the menu. I've used that menu to build a small collections of apps i have been experimenting with:
Rings, which works by extending RotatableScalable
Grey Lines, which uses TouchEvent.MOUSE_DOWN and TouchEvent.MOUSE_UP to read any blobs which appear on the stage
Squeegee, build an array of circles, then uses any blob information to rescale those circles based on their proximity to the blob, then uses the circles to mask an image which is revealed after you begin touching the screen
Cats Cradle, loops through all the blobs on the screen and draws a line in order of how the array of blobs is constructed. Good for studying how blobs are added an removed from the array
Physics, Flash Physics + Multi-touch -- a continued from the previous post
At the end of the video, I just wanted to give my thanks to NUIGroup, everyone there help me tremendously with getting my multi-touch hardware up and running. I hope to offer value by doing these experiments and letting the community use them as needed.
Here are some thoughts I normally have when coming up with experiments like this. How can this be different than just something you can do with just a mouse? It's one thing to get one touch point working and build an application around that. But how does it change when you can pretend there are 2 mouse cursors you can work with? Then 3? Then 4? What is the best way to optimize the code for these applications? How can I take this and build something useful for a business? Is a gaming environment the best option for thinking of commercialization opportunities?
I feel this technology has opened some interesting windows of opportunity.
And once again, I'd like to offer all my source code for the video above to anyone who'd like to dissect it.
After searching around for a while, I decided to try the 
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