Are you interested in innovative, emergent, and interactive technology (multitouch, gestures, eye tracking, augmented reality, creative tech, etc) or the interactions we will have with information in the future? Do you create emergent experiences, have interactive applications/software or code frameworks for building interactive installations, applications, or projects? If so, then this opportunity really is for you.

I have some beta invites for a new website that’ll be doing a rapid beta test within the next week. For the beta, we’re especially looking for people that already have or are in the process of creating projects, applications and software frameworks within the interactive, emergent, and creative technology domain.

To sign up, send an e-mail to: mail[at]sethsandler[dot]com (or leave a comment below) with your e-mail, your name, company (if there is one) and [optionally] any information about a framework, application, or project you have that deals in creative and emergent interactive technology.

Depending on the number of submissions, I may not be able to invite everyone – so make sure to be one of the first. If receive an invite, you should expect it within the next week or so.

If you’ve already sent me a request (prior to this post), don’t worry – I already have you on the list and you should be receiving an invite within the next week.

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!

Take a look at the video below to see Argos in use. You can find the source and a binary (for windows users) here: http://code.google.com/p/ofxargos/

Make sure to check out the release notes and official Argos website at http://argos.dimitridiakopoulos.com/ The application is still feature-incomplete, but quickly approaching a usable state! Dimitri can really use community support; so make sure to say ‘hi’ to him and get involved to make argos the next coolest opensource music interface!

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.

The following is what I came up with. I never had the chance to finish and was only able to add mouse support at the time. So, here’s a preview of what might come to a multitouch screen near you at some point in the future.

It’s pretty slow since it uses bitmapdata and filters and the code is a bit of a Frankenstein of information I found online about ‘metaballs’. If I get a chance, i’ll see if I can get the code out.

Meanwhile, have some fun! Click around and push/move the lava!

What do you think? Lava enough for you?

If you’re not already familiar with twitter, then you’re currently missing out on one of the ‘newest’ (although Twitter is past it’s second birthday) social utility/networking websites sweeping the web.

To get a glimpse of the basic concept of twitter take a look at this video introduction from Common Craft:

With the premise of ‘What are you doing?‘  twitter users can post any open-ended message, thought, url/link, question, etc as long as it fits into the space of 140 characters (text letters).  Aside from ‘tweeting’ your own messages, you can ‘follow’ or subscribe to view the messages of others. Now, this doesn’t seem that powerful, does it? Well, it is and hopefully this will be apparent if you’re able to make it through the self-conversation that follows.

The problem with the video above and the basic premise of ‘What are you doing?‘ is that it causes a lot of misconceptions about the uses of twitter.

If you’re a twitter user and you talk to someone who isn’t, you’ll often get responses such as: “So you just let people know what you’re doing 24/7? Isn’t that somewhat creepy – if not stalkerish?” The quick answer would be “Sometimes.” While there are occurrences of people tweeting day and night about what they eat and where they’re sitting, the majority of people have something more substantive and interesting to say, and a smaller minority are using twitter for it’s unique and true ‘power’ – realizing there’s more than meets the eye.

On the most basic of levels, Twitter is the heartbeat of the web and often the world. Unique to Twitter is it’s ‘trending topics’ that show the most talked about unfiltered phrases or words circulating right now in real-time (no delay) across the web. This means if something important (or not so much) is happening or a major event occurs that affects a huge crowd and likely yourself, you’ll see it on twitter before anywhere else. Since trending topics are unfiltered, non-censored, and carry no agenda the most raw and current events display themselves.

To give an example, Michael Jackson died on June 25 and before the news networks and newspapers could announce the news, twitter was erupting in a Michael Jackson panic of speculation and hospitalization announcements. Twitter users broke the news to the majority before the media could, which is an enormous feat considering the power of today’s media outlets.

For most of us though, knowing what’s happening on a global scale might be interesting, but it’s not dire or interesting enough to sign-up for another site we’ll barely visit and less-often use. Going along with the misconception, if Twitter was only about answering ‘What are you doing’ would it be so bad? If you could know that your favorite band just booked a tour to your city,  your favorite author just finished their newest book and is giving away free copies, or the hero you never thought you’d meet could reply to something you wrote, would you want the opportunity? If you could ask a question and get hundreds of replies instantly, would that be beneficial? Could it potentially be educational?

The power of Twitter lies not just in what people are saying, but who is saying it. If I, an illiterate cook,  tweet “I ate the best cheesecake of my life at Mario’s Bakery” it’ll probably go unnoticed. If  Padma Lakshmi or Tom Colicchio of Top Chef tweet the same thing, it carries a new level of effectiveness – at least for those in the food industry, and I’m sure Mario’s Bakery wouldn’t mind. If you’ve ever wondered how something is accomplished or how to improve on an area in your life, all that’s needed is to follow an expert in your field of interest, and twitter gives people this opprotunity.

As an actionscript and flash developer, I follow the most influential flash developers on the web through twitter. The reason I do this is because they’re not tweeting what they ate for breakfast; they’re talking about the new things they’ve learned and sharing them. Grant Skinner has one of the most popular flash blog sites. By following him on twitter i’ve been able to vastly improve on my own techniques that he passes along – often things that never make it to blog articles on his website. By doing this for a number of various disciplines, I’ve vastly expanded my knowledgebase, am constantly seeing things I would never have known otherwise and the best part is that it requires no work or significant effort on my part.

Where else can you get free advice, insight, mentoring, or knowledge from some of the top officials, experts, entrepreneurs, leaders in the world? Typically you would pay hundreds of $$$/hr to step in the same room as some of the people you can follow for free on twitter, and often times they’re more than kind enough to reply to questions through Twitter. How much would it be worth to know what your hero or idol reads or listens to on a daily basis?

These are only a fraction of a percentage of what makes Twitter both interesting and useful. Since the list is truly too large for a single post, i’ll save it for a Part 2 where there will be a more structured list of both the misconceptions and use cases of twitter.

If you’re still reading this, I consider you very patient. hah! If you have some use cases please leave them below as I’d like to dive deeper into the current and potential uses to the Twitter paradigm.

I’ve been meaning to write about this for some time, but finally found the right time.

In June/July, I helped work on a combined project with University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and Recombinant Media Labs (RML).

The install was a reinstall of a previous setup. It consited of 10 individual screens 12 feet wide x 6 feet 9 inches tall. Together they formed a rectangle 24 feet x 36 feet. 10 projectors, 1 per screen, projected on each screen to create a full 360 surround experience. The setup was complimented by a 10 channel audio setup with dedicated microphones, 28 MM-4 miniature loudspeakers,  12 UPJ-1P VariO loudspeakers, and eight UMS-1P subwoofers. To say the least, it was a massive system.

On June 10th there was an opening performance of the system and later was open to the public for viewing. Check out the opening performance below which is a small portion of the 50 minute showcase.

Check out the timelapse of the entire setup:

For a detailed writeup, checkout Berry Threw (who also helped on the project) at: http://www.barrythrew.com/2009/06/15/recombinant-media-labs-at-ucsd-roundup/

Some images of the build/setup below:

Thanks to Peter Otto and Naut Humon for the opportunity to work on this project.

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 (from 0-1). One of the coolest things about this engine is that it’s orientation-less. This means, no matter how you’re orientated on the surface it’ll still recognize the gesture.

The main thing I contributed to the already created $1 gesture port was the ability to have multiple simultaneous gestures occurring at once. This means a single user can perform more than one gesture at a time or multiple users can perform their own gestures while someone else is using the device. However, there are flaws with this algorithm that I’m not fond of  that are performance (speed) related. I’ve only tested with up to 4 touches though so if someone can test with more, please let me know how it runs.

Currently, the demo isn’t fully segregated form the core gesture classes and therefore there’s still some work to be done so that the gesture classes can be used without the demo itself. In the meantime, go ahead and test this out and make sure to give some feedback; it also works with the mouse. The demo allows you to draw a gesture and if it matches on in the database, that gesture will ‘light up.’

The tolerance is set at 80% and therefore if a gesture doesn’t match 80% of a template, it’s not recognized. Both the source and swf file are included. To test the demo, just load up the TouchGestureDemo.swf in flashplayer or a web browser.

Stay tuned for more on this as i’ll show the basics for using this in your own projects in case you need help.

Thanks to Tito (Mathieu Vibrel) and the pyMT crew for pointing me in the right direction.

Gesture Demo gesture.zip Version: 1.0

Multitouch Gesture Engine Demo

Author:	Seth Sandler
Date:	October 13, 2009
MD5 Hash:	f59b34d4779b6959bfd2a62d0dcf00df

102.8 KiB 1371 Downloads Details...

Before I started with multitouch, I was experimenting with interactive virtual gaming. As a result, for one of my final class projects at UCSD, I created a dynamic game I call ‘Slider’ which is a 1-3 player virtual hockey type game that adapts to the number of people playing.

This games uses reactivision software, along with Flash, to detect ‘fiducial’ or symbol block movements. The game is played by moving these symbols on a table. Players can enter and exit the playing field at any time. The game adapts to the number of players. The lower the score, the better; the first player with a score of 12 ends the game.

At the time of creation, about 2 years ago, the future plans included projecting directly on the surface and implementing multitouch so users can play with their fingers and objects instead of only object symbols. Hopefully i’ll be able to eventually revisit this project and release it for all to play with.

If you have other ideas about similar games or how to improve this concept, leave a comment. Don’t forget to send it to your friends and share the magic of multiplayer virtual hockey aka ‘Slider’. So what do you think? Is this the next game of the future? haha You’ll have to challenge me to a round next time you see me

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!

Right now, the demo only supports multitouch (TUIO), but mouse interaction can be easily added back in. I’ve purposely left this demo application fairly open and non-spectacular so that others can looks at the code and easily make simple changes that’ll drastically affect the results and interaction. I only spent about an hour adding in multitouch support and playing with various values, so there’s plenty more to experiment and add.

Currently there’s 3 buttons to change the behavior.

1. The boids chasce eachother and move towards objects (fingers) close to them
2. The boids wonder around randomly and move towards objects (fingers) close to them
3. The boids chase eachother and flee objects (fingers) close to them

Documentation is included and provided by soulwire. Make sure to check out the original website by soulwire so you know the possibilities and can see a few more examples.

Please let me know what you think, any questions you have, and ideas that could help expand this example.

Download:

Flocking Demo boids_src.zip Version: 1

Author:	Seth Sandler, soulwire
Date:	November 18, 2009
MD5 Hash:	4b9a5dfea4413f460d4ab4b0a4048a9b

124.0 KiB 246 Downloads Details...

I’ve been going through and trying to collect and organize things on my computer and happened to find some old artwork. I’m hoping to eventually get time to revisit some of the more visual and artistic times I used to have time for.

Here’s a glimpse of some of my past work. I’d love to hear what you think!

These include: pen and ink and pencil drawings, illustrator and photoshop work, logo and magazine design and some other random manipulations.

Check out some of the dates on these; I feel old.

So? What’s your thoughts?

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 become the largest database for Natural User Interfaces and emerging technology. If you’re interested in do-it-yourself hardware/software, HCI, or multitouch interaction, NUI Group is the place to be.

If you like the book, leave some feedback below! If you’d like to contribute to future sections of the book, you can get involved here: http://nuicode.com/projects/wiki-book

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