Moto touch screen.

Got a link to a new ipod like system which is claimed to scale. 

One statement they made was that the 'system does not get confused even when fingers cross over' which makes me think they might be doing something similar to something I've been thinking about. 

Scalable Multi-Touch Prototype from MOTO Development Group on Vimeo.

Richie is back and going great guns on the visualisation. 

Will Paxton

Had a told about it about 30 mins-before-it-happened-presentation to Will Paxton some new advisor to the Prime minister . I did the ubicomp sales pitch and he nodded and sounded appreciative.

Makes you wonder what he was doing here.

I discoverd he was at IPPC which If I had known I would have said "Do you know Matthew Taylor? If yes then say sheep says hello".

DiamondTouch

I was trying to get a Mac program which would talk to the Diamond Touch machine with Jeff today. Jeff ended up complaining that the final result was far less accurate then the numbers he was used to ( 0-171 rather than 0-3000ish).

I suspect that they are doing some sub pixel reconstruction but why convert back to a 0-3000 odd value why not 0-1.0 (i.e a float). I'm not sure why perhaps I'm not right. Jeff seems to think that they have 3000 odd wires in the board (I'm not convinced).

I found this paper which looks easy to implement. Then I need to scale back to 0-3000 rather than use 123.434 pixels

http://www.iop.org/EJ/article/1464-4258/3/4/308/oa1408.pdf?request-id=28089999-5a85-47e4-b661-e7226eef9607

Perhaps I'm wrong and they do have 3000 pixels and for some reason the board is only reporting it has 171 wires(samples). In which case the DT people are missing something.

ShareIT project presentation.

Back to reading more by Passini.

How to build applications for the touch table

The system I'm currenrtly useing si the reacTIVIsion system 

http://reactivision.sourceforge.net/

The processing library is here 

TUIO_Processing.zip

the java one is 

TUIO_JAVA.zip

The Simulator is 

TUIO_Simulator.zip

http://www.tuio.org/?software

has a list of other stimulators, libries, trackers and so on. 

You needs the processing TUIO lib. 

http://www.tuio.org/?processing

I tend to go with processing it goes full screen straight away. 

http://www.processing.org/

The lanauges is a reduced version of Java, but it handles the constantly redrawing stuff. 

I tend to use http://www.jbox2d.org/ to do the physics of interaction. 

To get stuff working you might need open sound control (http://opensoundcontrol.org/) library 

http://www.sojamo.de/libraries/oscP5/  ( for processing). 

Space and Place part 2

I've been reading a paper by Paul D about space and place ten years on. I need to re-read the original but the basis seemed that Space was also a social construct. That is the geometric concept of space is based on maths and maths is a social construct so everything is social construct really.

I think the problem I have with this is that when people talk about this is a social construct and that is a social construct there is this implicit assumption that everything is equal. As an example I heard someone on the radio saying that science has narratives and literature has narratives and all the impression was that fundamentally everything is a narrative and implicitly all one narrative is no better or more authoritative than another. I really find this as slipshod thinking, not all narratives are equal and not all social constructs are equal.

Equally not all social constructs are created equal.

I have a similar disquiet about the idea of the interrelation between things. I can understand this in graph theoretic terms everything is interconnected you can find links from everything to everything else, but I'm not sure that you have to understand everything to understand something.

On the plus side I did like the idea about top down is planning/design and bottom up is adoption/appropriation.

Lets see what T says about it.

continuing...

R is here and things are running along nicely with the floor. We are becoming Aurdiono central at the moment. Incidentally Aurduino have updated there stuff with a new bigger board and a faster CPU. Tinkerit are now selling an ethernet connection and someone has done a DHCP for the ethernet sheild

I've been bogged down with exam writing, Msc projects which look completely brain dead and a Phd first year viva. So not much help there. Hopefully Paul and I will have time to write up atrium study for next Thursday ( I think).

Simon has disappeared midst rumours of he getting a huge influx of assistance and full time PHD students. I didn't see much of him at Chi - He seemed to ignore the sessions completely.

Looking back for me Chi2009 was very reassuring. There is a 80% rejection rate but the stuff that gets in isn't that good. Or as one paper put it the chances of getting best paper were no different from randomness. Ended up with Tom R and Yvonne and Steve B playing if HCI person was a rock-star which rock-star would they be (seemed funny at the time). What else well I found CHI very friendly and I bumped into so many people I knew it was great. I really really want to put a paper in for next year.

Ethnography

I am not convinced we

chi Thursday.

What else has been happening - I was in a multi-touch workshop at which Jeff Han was present ( but not Apple as he pointed out). I spoke up for non premature freezing on stuff.


Nice talk about new type of interaction debugger. The why-line, very good I would like on.

ArgoUML - one source software design tool.

more people turned up to the facebook group than the engineering group!

more from chi

Listened to Tom R and Co try to differentiate Ethnomethodology i.e. Ethnography. It really raised my awareness but I reflected and realised that what I and many people need is the exact opposite of Ethnography. I like the commercial bias if Ethnography, you want to sell to a particular crowd in a particular region so you take an Ethnographic approach and find problems which you then solve with your technology. This assumes you know your client group up front and you know the solution.

So what I need is the reverse - I have a solution and I need to find a group with that problem. Specifically at the moment I need people who need to collaborate over a table. This is not just me many people who have innovated new technologies are looking for the right target group and much of the inputs are driving them.

Problem is there are infinitely many problems with out solutions. Frequently with technology it is the technology with a solution which creates the question ( the problems). For me this is the basis for engineering/computing research.

Live at CHI

Well here I am at chi2009 crruently sitting in the big ethnography talk . Should be good.