Just another abstract, thought, art, code, and multitouch weblog
If debugging is the art of removing bugs, then programming must be the art of inserting them. -Unknown
It’s been a while since I posted and my guilty conscious is saying “now’s the perfect time”.
The past few weeks, I’ve been working on my first iOS application called NodeBeat.
NodeBeat is a collaboration between myself and Justin Windle. It’s an experimental node-based audio sequencer and generative music application for the iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad and TUIO devices.
Community Core Vision (CCV) is a computer vision framework for multitouch and other emerging interaction types. I co-founded and developed CCV for Google Summer of Code in 2008. It has since been downloaded over 250,000 times and utilized by companies, researchers, and hobbyists around the world.
Ever since I saw Jeff Han’s lava lamp multitouch demo, I’ve been interested in ‘blobs’ or ‘meta-balls’. There’s a great new HTML5/javascript demo of interacting with blobs (moving, splitting, merging, etc) http://hakim.se/experiments/html5/blob/03/.
If you’re using Drupal, you’re probably using views. If you’re using views, than you’ve probably wanted to build a view that involved combining content and found out it was hard or almost impossible through the views UI.
For example, if you’ve ever tried to build a single view of all content (posts, comments, flags, relationships, etc) into a single list, you’ve probably found that you can’t. However, you can easily build independent post views, comment views, flag views, and relationship views. Since that’s the case, why can’t we merge all these views into a single view through the views UI? Well you can, and this article hopefully will give the basic information needed to start merging your views
If you’re familiar with the Jazzmutant Lemur, you’ll want to get familiar with Argos Interface Builder by Dimitri Diakopoulos using the great c++ framework openFrameworks.
Last summer I took part in Google Summer of Code as a mentor. Dimitri proposed a multitouch music interface builder and I thought it was a fantastic idea. An opensource lemur; who wouldn’t like that??? Dimitri was chosen as a student for GSoC and I was able to mentor him as he developed Argos. It’s come a long way, and with a little help from the opensource community, it has potential to be incredible!
If you’re familiar with multitouch, you’re probably familiar with Jeff Han’s TED demo. In it, there’s an example of a lava application that shows an interesting use of multitouch.
A few months ago, I was trying to work on something similar.
On my last project I had to use a gesture to initiate an event. Due to this, I recently started experimenting in creating a simple multitouch version of some gesture engines that are available. I’ve come across three that are already available in AS3 and chose to start with the $1 gesture algorithm http://depts.washington.edu/aimgroup/proj/dollar/. It only seems fitting to start with this one since Andy Wilson of microsoft research (and many multitouch devices) had a hand in it’s development.
Like most algorithms, this one matches points drawn with a template that’s already stored. After the gesture is finished, it is matched up against templates in the database and given a percentage of how much it matched it’s closest template
For a while I’ve been interested in emergent behavior where simple rules can create complex behavior. One of the most known examples of such behavior is Craig Reynolds ‘boids’ where a few simple rules can recreate the flocking behavior of birds.
I recently came across a great and clean example of some boids code by soulwire (make sure to check out his whole site; it’s great). Since we’ve seen various examples of this behavior on multitouch tables (like on the iBar), I decided to add some basic touch support to soulwire’s example. So, now we have it…multitouchable boids!
The long awaited Multitouch Technologies book authored by members of NUI Group (http://www.nuigroup.com) has officially found it’s first release! As one of the co-authors of the book, I am proud to see a final initial version come to fruition. The book, which consolidates articles from the NUI Group Wiki, includes sections on how to build Multi-touch devices, multitouch software resources, a glossary of terms and more. I believe, as the book develops further, this will be the best resource for multitouch information on both the web and in print.
If you’re unfamiliar with NUI Group, I suggest reading the about page http://nuigroup.com/log/about/. NUI Group is currently the single best resource for multitouch technology and hopefully will
Eugene has just ported Memo’s fluid solver work to AS3 http://blog.inspirit.ru/?p=248. With the source now out, I was able to quickly add multitouch support and it works great! Thanks to cyandesign and simpleex for keeping me on my toes.
A couple notes, the touchlib AS3 classes had to be corrected since they currently don’t send dX and dY values which the fluid solver needs to calculate directional velocity. Other than that, things went fairly smoothly and took little time to make touch sensitive.
Want to build a multitouch table? See my build below!
Audiotouch Multitouch Flash OS
