Guzumped

A couple of years ago ( really was it that long ?) I worked on trying to unpick the signals from Diamond touch and then spot both fingers. Well I wrote a simple version and got about 80% success rate from it - not bad. I wrote it up but the paper got rejected ( mostly due to poor success rate )

I've thought of a better mechanism one that would handle multiple fingers ( more than two ) but the implement is quite difficult and with the cloud and the table I've never had enough time to really sit down and spend the 5 days it would take to redo.

Well in the mean time someone had managed to do something and get it published! Impressive the paper reads really like the one I wrote but this one managed to get published and it had an 80% success rate.

I'm not that miffed - I had got distracted on other things. But I did feel it was more fundermental - makes implementing 2*1D tables very possible.

I'm more irritated with my self someone else managed to do a multiple mice paper - which was technically much easier but I never managed to think of the useage case ( again side tracked on the table + cloud).

Microsoft Surface arrives

Just before I had to go home to get kids from school  - more play in the morning  - heavy, comes with  fiducals. More later

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. 

Exhibition time.

From Tabletop

From Tabletop

From Tabletop

Paul Demoing.

From Tabletop

From Tabletop

My finger.

From Tabletop

Multi finger in action. 

From Tabletop

Quite a crowd. 

Well I managed to get quite a good sun/gravity demo working. By using the screen as the target I managed to get reactor vision to compensate for the spherical distortion of the screen and you get quite good registration. 

Down side was that Ricky kept stabbing the touch screen with both hands making large numbers of planets. Eventually you got a multi-threading error which meant I had to restart the process. I've fixed the bug bit it was an irritation while demoing I could have done with out (Didn't IBM have people going round the stands at exhibitions causing known bugs to appear on their competitors products - and they where rivals. Ricky does it for team mates). 

On the good news front looks like we have a gig at the Science Museum's Dana center. 

  

And this is worth a look two.

links for the day touch light

More useful links on building tables

More useful links on Silicon building for zero force tables. 

Tabletops...

Got reacTIVision and Touche working with the new table. 

Ordered ethernet based sensor from Audon

I quite like to use OSC to drive the iPOd touch to do something with the ecology of devices.

Odd thought of the morning.

Listerning to the radio news about political approach to handeling the kinds of database problems by junior members of staff. What would happen if you built a tangible interface to a database - columns represented by cards. Place the cards down to make queries. 

Possible to handle privacy issues automatically? 

Chi papers

Had a nice meeting with Yvonne and the others yesterday. General conversion about papers for Chi. Having spoken again with Paul we think that could be a good paper about the location of the new table. 

New table is to be simple but playful guide to location of people in the new building. Theory is we test it out and see how syntactical view of location applies - good sheep paper. 

Also Y. wants something quick measuring/visualising activity in building. I like notion of doing say slow trails of people + measuring network traffic+noise as an indication of how much people are present. Again I can rework this syntactically plus look at C.Raty stuff. 

Visit from City University

Just finished a demo to Dr Sara Jones and Professor Neil Maiden. They have a new Diamond touch table and where looking for people who had used them. 

I came in late ( working libary and lost time but Simon phoned me to remind me), but had a nice discussion about using tables/tangibles in the context of user interface elicitation. 

So this was the last in a row of three demos of the fishtable. 

Over lunch Neil mentioned having some contacts with web usability people and I mentioned my intreast in  finding click stream data AND eye tracking in games (apparently not done yet).

Mean while the wrong kind of silicon sheet was delivered - to thick and not squashy! Makes me wonder if working on the vision tracking is better approach. 

Next week are moving buildings! 

iphone sdk available

I've been working on the UIST paper and getting side tracked looking at new iPhone developer stuff. All objective C and very swish too, I could get something working quick but I think lots of other developers would have a steeper learning curve. 

Makes me wonder what I might write if I had the inclination to make an application for cash. Something weby mashupy comes to mind but does this use the multi touchness? Some ideas are leaking into my mind but nothing definite. 

day of good ideas (AKA squeak rant)

The PC died in transit to the show. Jeff wants to use this as an excuse to get USB connection working to table. The down side is that he wants to make it work in smalltalk (in fact more specifically in squeak). I'm quite the cosmopolitan when it comes to computer languages but I'm not sure I want to stick to a ghetto language with out any specific reason to do so apart from Jeff's reluctance to learn anything else. I can hardly blame him, I've seen people resolutely stick to the first language they learnt over a 30 year carrier in computing. 

I love changing languages but have recently come to the conclusion that the reason I change languages is to get access to some new cool library (compiler writers please take note) that lets me code something neat up quick. That said I'm about to go back to C++ to use the open computer vision library but open computer vision is in desperate need of a significantly well written user guide. 

So my research in the next few weeks will lie either with signal processing signals from the diamond touch table or doing real time video processing for gesture recognition and we should do this all in squeak because it is good at using the multimedia processing features (oddly no), you can deliver double click-able applications that conform to the operating system  interface standard that the non programmers on the team can use(no), that lots of people can reuse our library (no), that we can make the program open source by integrating it on to source forge. Basically there is no clear reason to my mind to program this in smalltalk any more than there is a reason to program this in visual basic. 

I'm open to the case to use smalltalk but I need something distinctive that smalltalk has that I can't find anywhere else (translation give me a USP). Don't get me wrong small talk is a good tinkers language, if you out put are papers to conferences rather than code that other people can use( which is the life of an academic so I don't think Jeff is badly trained)  then small talk is the way to go. But I'm not sure this is my or the projects context. 

pod casting and other things

Yesterday I managed to do my talk at UEL which means I have some people who have done half of the podcasting experiment! 

Worrying meeting with Yvonne looking at what I would say I would do and what I have done (ekk!). 

Meanwhile had interesting conversation with Paul about the flat microphone. I told him I was interested in recording a meeting and using the diagram being made ( or animation there of) as the index into the audio recording. So moving forwards and backwards in time provided the index to the audio in combination with the this is interesting button. 

I also mentioned ( again ) doing interface to the finger drawing program to display the undo que. So if you undo back to a point in time and start drawing again you get a new branch (like a fork) in the display. A new document is just undoing everything, making the root a bush. 

I'm not so sure how to measure what this is doing.... 

On the way home had an interesting idear for a mobile phone. Have a wrist watch with a ring attached ( via small cable ), then if phone rings you just lift you finger to your ear and your wrist to you mouth ( or near to). Use rotating disk on outside of phone to select addresses. Might make picture to show at some point.

intimate technology

Spend most of the morning talking to Jeff (its addictive) whacting videos of some strange art projects. Jeff thinks you can get a large whiteboard/screen which work with multiple pens.

WE chatted about a pen based table interface - capturing writing as text input. Can't make a pen or paper clip work on table. Jeff appears to be into methodologies more than technology( I see them as linked - technologies imply some kind of way of using them). Jeff mentioned the success of the open space technueqe.

Two things I was inspired was to make some flexible (white translucent rubber?) screen to project on to or possibly use a tactile surface( vevlet,silk) to make the table top surface with. Using guages to measure 'pressure' perhaps. Not sure.

Another demo used breath measureing devices in cloths to make one more aware of breath and how we might use that to signal to others.

I would have combined the cloths and breath together using a corset to both be the device and measure. Jeff mentined some work on weaving circuts into cloth. I like the going back to jaquard loom - does history move in cycles or are we in some strange temporal/conceptual orbit?

back to boaring TMA ( 6th revision now).

pictures of the first experiment

We did these experiments a few weeks ago but I thought would get the pictures up now. Here we can seen the team of victims (sorry subjects :-)) around the touch table discussing the stratigy they want to use on their layout. It would have been nice to get a hands on shot but no luck.






This is a bit of wider view showing people using the mouse based interface and you can see the video cam in shot too.

Not bad I had to program the mouse orrientation interface at the last moment. The user interface is still highly unfriendly and needs work.

next week off to dimond touch work shop ( uhg too tried ) .

Pictures from the amazon table

this is a picture of the amazon table -on of the multi touch table projects I am working on. By putting you fingers on the table and pullling them appart it zooms in to the Amazon landscape. By pulling your fingers together you zoom out. IF you keep zooming in you eventually get to see thebooks. This appears to be quite natural.





this shows the books section - on the web version clicking on the books goes to Amazon.

fun with GML Diamond touch driver for the mac.

On Friday I ended up spending most of the day working with the GML mac driver.
http://iihm.imag.fr/projects/gml/
The driver let me write a mac version of the PC merl program ( kind of a Diamond Touch debugger). Looking at the output we began to wonder if it was possible to pick up 2 or 3 individual fingers. With this you could draw a line between two fingers or use it to roate a knob or shape.

Anneli was determined to figure it out and kept me thinking about it while I should have gone off and got some admin work done.

I will test the Mac Merl program for a bit and possibly release it ( I need to contact the GML people to see if I can relase their library with it).

zooming interface - first mulitple person demo.

First demo of the tablet to HCI group.

I think it went pretty well a fair amount of useful input ( try using colour) could you use this to look at large who-knows-who data sets. Could you use the zooming to control unfolding a to-do interface.

I spent most of the morning try to get the demo working but the PC has problems with running the video projector AND the externa VGA big screen. I think we need a second monitor.

The VC is coming to visit in march and it looks like the tablet is on display.

Need to come up with better second screen interface.

diamondspin found!

I've wasted a lot of time trying to get Jbuilder and CVS to work together. Even http://www.tortoisecvs.org/ failed it can only handle a CVROOT on the same machine not as a remote drive. I'm guessing but I think the OU don't have a Pserver or a Kserver... although I could be wrong. I don't know enough about the servers to know what kind of unix boxes they have yet I could SSH to. I need to go and talk to more people. Still all very fustrating.

From the mac I CVS checkedout the source code to the zoom family tree stuff and then began to find my way though all the code. All very fustrating, the code that exists to run the diamond touch stuff never came up on my google searchs. Paul had some examples which ran in Java ( harray), and I was trying to figure out how to use them. Over lunch ( was is positivisum) mention was made of a diamond touch subsystem. After stuggleing with 3( count them ) diffrent java IDE's I eventually found something i could maniuplate. A little low level but hay that's cool. Y&P and the new woman Eva left for high tea while I hacked into the code which began to work!

I then got the pure zoomView to work and now just need to use the background thread feature of zoomView to pick up the touch and box events I have a couple of days doing PHD stuff but hope to have something primative on friday.

when i got home Yvonne emailed me a very excellent link to the diamondSpin people. Diamond spin hopefully if enough people linkt to it then it will appear in Google.

I think it might be possible to hack the diamond hardware and project up from a projector to some gound glass this would remove the hand shadow problem.