About Me
My name is Seth Sandler (26) and I am a musician, educator, researcher, developer, and artist (not always at the same time). I have a degree in Interdisciplinary Computing and the Arts with an emphasis in Music from the University of California, San Diego. I have a background in both music and art and often focus on how they relate to each other. I also have an interest in education and have taught music and leadership at High Schools throughout the Southern California area. I’m currently pursuing research and development in the area of natural user and multi-touch interfaces.
I’m most notably known for being co-founder and developer of Community Core Vision (CCV/tbeta), the Multitouch Mini (MTmini), Audiotouch, and former chief community offier of NUIGroup.
This blog space serves as a documentation of my own research and projects, an information space for others to learn and pursue multitouch and other natural user interface technology, as well as random thoughts and information that comes my way.
Feel free to ask questions, make comments, or give helpful insight at any time. If you are specifically interested in multi-touch technology, please check out NUIGroup.com where you will find an invaluable resource of information and applications about multitouch and other natural user interface technologies.
resume to follow…
Hi, Seth. I belong to the NUI group forum. I plan to integrate music in some of my applications. I’m a school psychologist, so at this point, I’m focusing on interactive applications for special needs students. I work with children who have autism, and they really love technology and music.
I took a graduate computer music technology class, but at the time, I didn’t know much about multi-touch interfaces. I’d like to learn more about what you are working on.
Hi Lynn,
I have worked with high school music students for the past 5 years, so educational music applications may be part of my focus. I’d love to hear any ideas you have. I have a couple small music applications I will be adding on here within the next week that may be fun for children. Right now I’m working in Flash, which is easily available for most people. More complex music development will probably need to be programmed in another environment or on cooperation with Flash.
Ideally, I’d like to have simple “fun” musical programs as well as more advanced practical applications that dive deeper into music application. There’s a lot more infromation that will be added to this blog on both the hardware and software/idea side very soon. =)
Music should be fun. I think the focus of some music applications should help young people develop creative music composition skills.
I remember when I was about six years old. I was so excited to take piano lessons. I mistakenly thought that by taking lessons, I would be learning how to compose the music I had in my head. My piano teacher burst my bubble by telling me that I couldn’t compose music until I learned to play all of the music contained in the music books she had on her shelves.
It would be great if the kids of this generation could have the opposite experience!
Seth,
I am an engineer at Eon Reality in Irvine, CA. We specialize in 3D Visualization and virtual reality. You may have seen or heard about our Touchlight multitouch interface.
Anyways, I am doing some research on multitouch and I came across your work which is quite impressive. The project I am researching is a similar music based app using virtual turntables. It seems we both share a passion for music and technology.
I would like to find out more about your project and perhaps collaborate with you on something in the future.
Best of luck to you.
Justin
Hi Seth,
Great project and thanks for posting all the info on it.
I’m currently working on my masters thesis on gaze interaction and have some ideas on how to combine this with hand-gestures and multitouch, ie. selection by fixating on objects on large screens and then manipulation by hand gestures.
Have you taken any of inspiring classes held by prof. Jim Hollan at UCSD?
The information you published here will come in handy for my project, once again thanks!
Best wishes,
Martin Tall (project recently started on blog.martintall.com)
Hi Martin. Thanks for the kind words. Keep in touch, I’d love to hear your ideas sometimes.
It’s funny you asked about Jim Hollan, as he contacted me last week asking if I could meet with him and share my multitouch experience with him and his students that are experimenting in multitouch interaction. I’ll be meeting with him this week =) Since my major is so distant from the the cogsci department I didn’t know much about him until now and hadn’t heard about the great classes that unfortunately I will be missing in HCI.
Once I get things settled more with the project, I will be posting many updates. Stay tuned and thanks again! =)
Hey Seth,
First off…great work! I wish I had found your page before I started working on my own touch surface! Your work looks awesome.
I’ve been working on a touch surface/interface with another student here at CalArts over the past month and we pretty much have it done. We are using custom software we wrote in Max/MSP and Reaktor and were using Reactivision 1.3. We wanted to test it out with finger tracking instead of using fiducials, and for some reason can’t seem to get the version of 1.4 from the Reactivision CVS to compile. Do you have a compiled version? I thought you might have in your downloads but all I can get is the Tuiosimulator 1.4
let me know! Our installation goes up on tuesday in Los Angeles so hopefully we can get finger tracking up in time…
thanks,
Jordan
Hi Seth,
I stumbled upon your blog through the NUI forum and smiled when I saw you’re at UCSD (I was in Muir, class of ‘05). I minored in music but work these days as a researcher at UCSF and am interested in using multitouch in conjunction with image and structure analysis/ teaching applications. I’m slowly starting my own project and am using your blog as a sort of template since your project is so well documented and is obviously working well.
Thanks and keep up the good work!
–Andrew
Hi Seth
Ive just stumbled upon your site and think the work you are doing here is great. I am a student with the university of Teessides school of computing in the UK and am developing a touch screen synthesisizer interface in flash for my final project. I did actually come across one of your posts on kirupa regarding fading audio during the development of my application.
We do not have a touch screen table at the universty and are currently using an interactive whiteboard which doesnt support multi touch.!! I have had to adapt my interface to suit this limitation. However i would love to and intend to run my application on a touch surface when they are more readily available here in the UK.
Out of interest does the actionscript 3.0 code have to be different to accept multi touch inputs or does the hardware deal with that? for example would my code that has been written to operate on a single touch whiteboard i.e one key pressed at a time, need to be changed, im thinking probably not. I will enjoy looking through your blog and may find the answers there.
Once again brilliant work seth, i love the audio envelope feature.
Kind Regards
Liam Watson.
Hey i am very interest in your project, when i get my first pay check, i will go straight foward to buy a quality webcams, i am thinking of doing some wacking things thanks a lot.
I am really amazed also that you are at the ICAM major, i want to transfer to it.
any good tips? GPA? Credits? Is ICAM really only music? There isn’t other way like programming or visual?
Thanks again?
Hi Carlos, where are you from?
ICAM can have a emphasis in either music or visual art. It’s up to you.
I am from imperial valley, 2 hours away from san diego by the border in Mexico with Mexicali.
Well i love coding and operating systems, specially unix, and yeah linux haha.
But i want to go to the one that has more coding or software related. Can you tell me what you have seen? how it works different for both? because i am guessing there both really different?
hei seth,
my name is rachel and i’am from paris,
i think your multitouch pad is amazing.
and i wanted to ask you something,cause i have this keyboard a casio ctk and i wanted to make the keys much heavier like the touch of a piano,do you think there is any ways to achieve that, ? if you have any idea please let me know.
bye bye.
I’d love to have an offline conversation about a practical music system that could be integrated into your design. There are some profound impacts of this kind of system on pro audio interfaces.
Regards
-Rex Gibson
noamt1@gmail.com
Hey Seth,
First off, let me say, great work!
I’m currently in the planning stages of building a multi-touch system that will be used in an educational setting. I’m planning on developing custom software in conjunction with the teachers that work directly with the students.
The one question that I had for you is this: have you ever noticed any performance hiccups with Flash and your setup? It seems like there are a lot of places in the TouchLib and reactivision documentation where people state things like “Only use Flash as a last resort, performance is bad!”, etc. However, I can’t imagine I’ll be deploying anything that’s much more complex that what you’ve already got going on. I’m already familiar with Flex, and I figure that’s just a hop-skip away from AS3 in Flash, so I’d prefer to use that, but I’m scared of this “performance” (myth?) that seems to be floating around. Just curious if you could give me (and others) some insight into what kind of performance you get out of Flash, what your computer hardware is like, etc.
On a side note — do you develop your AS3 in Flex or Flash? I think I read somewhere that you have to make changes to library calls or something to port the code out there from Flash to Flex, and I was wondering if you had any experience with that. However, the first part of this post is the important part
.
Thanks again for your inspirational work, and keep it up!
ey im from mexico too hahah
emm but im searching for solve problems for have a MT complet sistem in a mac
¬¬
here is my msn and my yahoo
oritatelodoy@hotmail.com
nomegustadarlo@yahoo
Dear Seth,
I am currently in the beginning stages of building a multitouch table, quite similar to the one that you have constructed here. This will be used in the performance of a graphic score. Most of the coding will be done in either Pure Data or Max (but PD feels better cause its open source, if you know what I mean). Anyway, while i have a good working knowledge of PD, I am not sure how best to get the input from this table INTO PD… If you have any ideas, I would love to hear them.
Also, really keen to check out the mac version.
So yeah, anyway… I am a first year Masters student of Performance/Composition at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne… I think it would be very interesting to talk…
Cheers
sam
ps what ur doin lookz aws
ta muito fixe
Hi Seth,
first off, my regards for what you’re doing.
This site contains a lot of good informations about my bachelors project, and is very interesting and helpful for a lot of us, working on this stuff.
I’m writing a thesis about the HCI, and specifically about the new tangibles interfaces in the audio performances, and the usability of these. Do you have any documentation you want suggest to me? This would be very helpful for my work.
Anybody out there can help me?
gandi[dot]marco[atl]gmail[dot]com
Thanks
Hey Seth, I’m trying to work on a multi touch project for a client of mine and wondering if you’d be able to help out by answering some questions? Would pay you $500 for your consulting fees. Please email me at the email address I have commented from if you are interested, thanks!
very impressive, i can see here mankind’s future interface …
Hello,
I could not find your contact info, so please excuse me for posting this technical comment in your site
I’ve been playing with MTMini for some time (works great) and as a programmer, I wanted to understand the principle upon which the Smoke (Smoke Demo) is generated. So I downloaded touchlib and played with the cpp sources; and yet although everything compiled successfuly, I could not get GLUT open up a window (the program exits immediately after loading config; ITouchInterface object is successfuly created).
I will now go into debugging business, but maybe you can ease the pain of mine and tell whether you changed something in the sources or not? If so, can you provide the sources?
Thank you for your time!
Regards,
A Human.
(If you bother to answer, can you please do it by emailing me? Thank you.)
Hey! How i can use MTmini with google maps? how an iPhone
Hello!
My name is Patrick. I am from Poland, so sorry for my English. I have a question. We like dash from the display, however, as załatwiłeś reverse an image problem. As you’ve done well that the screen is touch? You have the camera there? Because the camera does not have sketches.
Yours,
Patryk
Seth,
I have yet to obtain all the ‘components’ required for the project, is all the ’stuff’ I need included in the .zip file? I do not wish to spend money or buy programs desperately.
Anonymous.
I’m not sure what project you’re referring to. If you mean the MTmini. The download package on the MTmini page is what you need along with the hardware in the video.
Hi Seth,
?
First of all, your work is amazing, Having a music background you can still manage to code some amazing image processing softwares, that really baffles us how you can manage everything, what is your age
Hi brainiak,
Thanks for the kind words. I baffle myself with all this sometimes too hehe. I just turned 25 last week.
Seth,
I’m interested in placing this touchscreen next to and LCD/computer I plan to mount in my coffee table. How heavy is the program on CPU usage? I wanted to use an older laptop I have lying around, but I’m afraid the processor load will be too much for the older system.
Also, what about a typing program for the multi-touch system. Does one exist somewhere as freeware? I would find it helpful to be able to turn just a section of the screen into a keyboard, and have the rest as a mouse so that I have nothing on the coffee table.
Let me know what you think, and thanks!
Erich
Good stuff! I will try to keep up with this project!
Seth you are an amazing guy! I remember back in the day you showed me all the music making stuff on the computer so I am not surprised at all that you followed your dream to create such an awesome thing!!! congrats, -nat and nicki
Hi Seth,
As part of my final year project I’m investigating the use of non-traditional input methods in computer games for the PC. I’ve been using Microsoft Touchless, and I’ve a few videos of my progress so far on my blog. Just seen your video of using the paper with glass over a box to use shadows as markers, that’s an amazing idea, and is something which I’m definitely going to try out, as it helps stay away from the issues of using coloured markers which may interfere with the colours of a user’s surroundings.
Jonathan
Sounds great Jonathan. I recommend you come join us at nuigroup.com/forum where we have a whole community of people doing work in this field.
hi seth
i´m from cordoba – argentina and I want to know if you can tell me where I can found the sources of your “live composer” reactivision+puredata+flash. thanks you!!!
your work is amazing!!!
Hi Seth,
I’ll make sure to follow your blog as well and will check out your work and apps.
Cheers,
alex
Thanks Alex
Feel free to let me know your thoughts on any of this.
-Seth
Seth,
Im a 24 year old 6th grade teacher looking to add some sweet technology to my classroom. I’m been researching MT tables for a while now. Your table is exactly what I was looking for. Have you written any detailed instructions yet. I’ve searched your site for a while now and cant seem to find anything. Keep up the good work.
Dave
Another one seth,
My name is Seth Sandler (25) and I am MUSICIAN, educator, researcher, developer, and artist (not always at the same time).
Hi, Seth.
We have all the required hardware. And install MTmini Package software, as well as Flash Player 9, Visual Studio 2005 SP1 x86 redistributable package, Java 1.6 + . in accordance with your slide [MTmini - Getting Started.pdf] .And we worked successfully for each step ,including the Smoke Demo & Windows Mousedriver .But Flash Applications can’t be successed. And I do the step1(Server) and step2( Gateway). The result is the same as the slide but I can not do the Flash Demos(The step3). What is the problem we meet?
Leo: The problem your having is from not setting your flash global security settings I am pretty sure. To do this click here, and add the location where all of your mt apps are, set to always allow, good luck
hi,
i just made the mtmini from all the videos n tuts…i have it working but its very bumpy,i can see the photo demo working but the things just goes nuts…what are the ideal settings or how does the tracking screen look like…could you post a video showing your app window…so we can see a working mtmini’s tracking screen.
also is it possible to develop a small app which can send out midi signals…probable and 8 fader panel which can be configured to send midi messages…i wish i knew how to program apps,
if u guys can do it,this will be the most practical use of such an input device…a midi controller.
[...] el sitio de Seth Sandler podemos encontrar varias cosas interesantes, pero a mi me atrapó la sección para construir un pad [...]
Seth,
This is really brilliant work. I have an idea for another program. I know that it’s possible but I don’t have time to work on it myself.
You know the awesome visualization that are built into Windows Media Player? I’m sure you’ve noticed that most of them have sort of one or two “generator” blobs out of which come flowing all of the graphics, and then the graphics react to whatever sound file is being played, but they still have a sort of gravity that pulls them into certain streams. Well, can we get ahold of or create code that processes sound like that but lets people re-locate the generators with a touch or a drag, but other wise the music would keep streaming, and maybe if no touches are being detected the generators flow back to their default locations? This would really put people into the music. What do you think?
James.
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