“Multitouch” seems to be all the rage lately, mostly because Apple hyped it with the iPhone, though the idea has been around for a while. Make lets us know about a way to create a do it yourself multitouch system that seems to work pretty well. See the video to see for yourself:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eS4L5avQqM[/youtube]
The system uses a camera, mirrors, and a computer, just like our Dialog Table.
The difference is that the software for this, VVVV, is freely available for non-commercial use. I’d love to see their patch to know how they did it. I bet that a similar setup is achievable with Jitter or Processing, too, the latter of which is free as well.
Linked in the comments for that post is also a blog from a grad student in Holland, who goes by the handle Gravano, doing some work with multitouch as well. He has many pictures and progress updates on his work posted, in addition to helping run a wiki and a forum. The opening post on sums up the contents of the blog fairly well:
In January this year I co-founded, a community called NUIgroup (Natural User Interface) Open Source Multi Touch Community, with a couple of other guys. Since there wasn’t alot of information online related to FTIR and DIY multitouch, we decided to centralize all the information of all our individual projects, so other people can learn and contribute to it as well.
Currently I’m working on a multitouch related project with 3 other guys from school. I’m soon going to develop a second multitouch display prototype. I will be posting my developments on this blog, as well as some usability thingies from time to time.
Looks like something worth keeping an eye on.
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