Multitouch surface made from commodity PC components
I just caught a demo of the Tactable multitouch surface, which grew out of an MIT Media Lab project. It's an impressive product, a mid-sized table with a sharp projector set underneath the glass. It uses an array of moderate-resolution optical sensors to tell where it's being touched, and the sensors have variable focus, so they can sense 3D gestures over the surface as well as contact with the surface itself. The projector's good and bright, and the picture looked good in a well-lit room (albeit a darker corner of same). And being optical, the sensors can also recognize objects laid on the surface, reading bar-codes, text, shapes, etc. It opens up a myriad of possibilities for game design, some kinds of creative workflow (sound and video editing) and other situations where novel UIs are apt to unveil new possibilities.
One thing I really liked about it all is that it's just a PC running a bunch of commodity hardware -- a projector, some sensors -- with cool software on the back-end. This is invention-by-recombination at its finest, and it means that the price and performance of the surfaces are tied to the broader markets for optical sensors, PCs and projectors, which points to a rosy future. The company's business model is building and selling the things, simple enough, so they don't make any pretense about top-s33kr1t stuff within.
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I wrote an article sometime ago about a restaurant that used kind of that interaction via a table. Except that it was "cheating" because they really used a trackpad instead of a full touch-screen. The result is however quite fun.
You can read the article (sorry in french but the pictures say it all) her.
I wrote an article sometime ago about a restaurant that used kind of that interaction via a table. Except that it was "cheating" because they really used a trackpad instead of a full touch-screen. The result is however quite fun.
You can read the article (sorry in french but the pictures say it all) her.
Nothing you need the MIT for.
The cbase has one of those standing around. Pretty cool stuff, especially some of the games it has. Although the calibration is off quite often, but I guess that's more of a software issue.
Isnt this the same thing that they did a demo of Warcraft III on a couple of years ago?
>And being optical, the sensors can also
>recognize objects laid on the surface,
>reading bar-codes, text, shapes, etc.
Dice? Chess pieces?
@AKB #3
Dice would be easy, you'd just subtract the "visible" (i.e. bottom) side from 7.
Chess pieces would be more difficult. The sensors might be able to see the superstructure of the pieces, but you'd be better off marking the bases in some way, I guess.
Good thing PCs are an open platform!
@notacat
Chess would be easy so long as you started at the beginning of the game..
Build a basic one yourself: http://www.nuigroup.com/, no MIT required.
@notcat
Glyphs on the chess pieces would work great:
http://www2.parc.com/isl/members/jbreiden/glyphchess/glyphchess.html
Why bother MIT? Acording to James Bond MI5 has already got one (itsverynice) to wow Dame Judy Dench with. ...oddly though the British seemed concerned with conterfeit US dollars if I remember.
I second the mention of nuigroup.com. The Tactable website is vacuous. I'm surprised Cory even posted this, it is not interesting. The stuff going on at nuigroup is.
I was part of a project going by the name of Sociable which did just this a few months ago. Off-the-shelf hardware, open/accessible backends, and lots of homebrew frontend and intermediate-stage design and code.
+1 @#9 Memento Sushi for mentioning NUIGroup. So much information hides there.