Multi-touch build blog

Have been keeping myself busy trying to finish off the year old WPF branch of Modest Maps. Darren David started it a while back but it fell to the wayside due to bigger and better technology (deep zoom). I have been looking for a native WPF mapping client for a while and found the branch of the brilliant modest maps.

I hope to give it the multi-touch touch in the next week…! Expect video!

Since my last video I have put together a few new bits, a horizontal scrolling menu (although I neglect to show it scrolling in the video!), a virtual keyboard and a Flickr gadget. I think this shows how easy it is to put together reasonably usable apps in a relatively short space of time (for the most part, I do this on my own!)

I have spared you from my normal low frequency ramblings and replaced it with a rather nice track by the great Richard D James! Excuse the slow response from Flickr, either that or my broadband isn’t that broad!

Ordered, same size as the current mirror from B&Q! Can’t wait to see what the difference in projection quality will be like.

I said in a previous post that its important (to me anyway!) to get a decent framework established to make it easier to create new sorts of control.

It took me less than an hour to get live video streaming from a web camera to a new control, see the results below, needless to say, I am very pleased with the results.

Thought I might make use of my daughters old cot (well, a small part of it) that has been collecting dust in the garage. Since I have been able to make videos of my work in Multi-touch I have always wanted to do plan view videos. So I attached my video camera to the table as shown below and hey presto, plan view videos.

And here is a short video, shooting like this seems to get rid of the refresh rate problem I have had before!

I just need to remember to keep my head out of the way!!

Hello All,

I haven’t posted to my build blog for a while as I have been busy hiding away in my spare room assembling a rough framework for building WPF apps. Having seen WPF, Blend et al from a distance it seemed like a bit of a storm in a tea cup but I can honestly say it aint half bad!

The framework is now at the stage where I can easily create new gestures and controls and connect them together with fairly little code. A colleague of mine jokes about his programming methodology called “bone-idle programming” but all jokes aside I am trying to build a framework that allows this kind of attitude, little code, big result. Anyway, I have posted up a video (see below) which shows, a single finger hold type gesture on the canvas and also a list control which allows single finger moving and vertical scrolling.

Looking to the future I hope to;

• Implement Cursor gestures (with lots of help from Rich!)
• Implement  more object gestures (tap, double tap etc)
• Hack around with transitions / animations
• Video / Live video feeds
• Implement some type of multi-layer mapping object (vector based)
• Integrate various auxillary hardware, RFID, sound etc

Right, it’s late, i’m off to bed…

NUIGroup released a new version of their awesome blob tracker tBeta which is now dubbed CCV or Community Core Vision. The version boasts a lot of new exciting features, including;

Cameras:
Full PS3 camera support on windows
Support for Firefly cameras on windows

Fixes:
Background Removal on startup
GPU speed slightly faster than before
New calibration technique - Can now calibrate even when there are false blobs

Features:
Min/max blob tracking size sliders - Sets the minimum and maximum size blobs to look for
Dynamic background subtraction ‘learn speed’ slider - Sets the rate dynamic background subtraction occurs
Movement threshold to eliminate jittery blobs - Sets the minumum amount a blob must move to consider it as ‘moving’. This helps with jitter
Option to track dark or light blobs only (no more absolute background subtraction since it causes inconsistencies)
Startup in mini mode
Logging system - In bin\logs you can find a text log file of what happened when running the application. This should be useful in debugging errors

Low Level features:
Addon support for openframeworks - Option to not use TUIO and use directly with c++
Classes rewritten to comply with openframeworks addon standards

Communication:
TUIO direct to Flash sending through TCP - Can now send TUIO to flash without FLOSC (currently doesn’t work on Windows Vista for unknown reason)
Option to turn on/off width/height TUIO sending to comply with the TUIO 1.0 protocol
Now sending correct fseq, dX, dY, and maccel TUIO values.

Great stuff, hopefully now its all open sourced problems can be fixed faster than ever before, well done guys!

http://nuicode.com/projects/show/tbeta

To celebrate getting a new camera I decided to do a quick video of an application I wrote to test TUIO based multi-touch apps. It uses the Microsoft Multipoint SDK to read input from multiple mice and sends TUIO UDP packets to a target application running underneath.

Multipoint TUIO Application Test Tool from Dan Higham on Vimeo.

I always fancied building an image picker / sorter in 3D like the window “tabber” in Compiz and Vista! - Just noticed the poor editing at the end of the video! It’s 12.36am and I am tired!!

First experiments with real 3D in XNA from Dan Higham on Vimeo.

A colleague at work made the suggestion that it would be good to see speech recognition thrown in with multitouch, at the time I had just finished doing a little Flickr search which I thought would work really well with some speech recognition. One of the things I have wanted to do for a while is build some sort of on-screen keyboard. Now I am not so sure…. normal bad quality, low frequency speech caveat applies!!!

Speech Recognition! from Dan Higham on Vimeo.