Just another abstract, thought, art, code, and multitouch weblog
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/.
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Well, I never did a ‘proper’ video of my Audiotouch work, so after 2 years I decided to reshoot some video and experiment with my new HD video camera. The video is also in preparation for another how-to video that I’m developing that builds off the Mtmini video (check that out if you haven’t ) and shows how to create a simple multi-touch surface quick and easy.
I’m hoping to eventually get back to these applications and improve on a few of them. They’ve gone untouched for almost 2 years and were originally written prior to the iphone, ipad, and microsoft surface. It’s amazing how far the technology has come in such a short time.
[youtube 8IPRES6WF50]
Enjoy and let
Wall Pong is an interactive multi-player multitouch pong type game I wrote in AS3 a couple years ago. The aim is to get the ball into the opposing goal. You can see Wong within my Audiotouch OS software. I’ve been meaning to release the source code and game for quite some time and finally I had the chance to clean up the code (it still could use WAY more cleaning and probably re-factoring), but it’s in good enough shape for others to use.
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.
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!
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.
