Tag Archives: gesture-interface

“The Sixth Sense” – Wearable Tech

Posted on by

This demo — from Pattie Maes’ lab at MIT, spearheaded by Pranav Mistry — was the buzz of TED. It’s a wearable device with a projector that paves the way for profound interaction with our environment. Imagine “Minority Report” and then some!

Think Microsoft Surface without the table! This is amazing. The basic idea is that this device can augment our reality by providing information about objects we interact with in the real world. This immediate access to information at all times reminds me of Cory Doctorow’s book “Down and out in the Magic Kingdom”.

Touché – An open source multi-touch framework

Posted on by

Touché is an open-source multi-touch tracking environment for Leopard. It has been designed and written specifically for MacOS X Leopard and uses many of its core technologies, such as QuickTime, Core Animation, Core Image and the Accelerate framework.

The Touché environment consists of two parts: A standalone tracking application written in Cocoa, that comes with lots of configuration options as well as calibration and test tools, and a Cocoa framework that can be embedded into custom applications in order to receive tracking data from the tracking application. This way, you can easily experiment with MacOS X technologies such as Core Animation or Quartz Composer on your FTIR multitouch table.


Touché Multitouch Framework – Simple Demo Apps from Georg Kaindl on Vimeo.


Touché Multitouch Framework – Introduction from Georg Kaindl on Vimeo.

It’s pretty impressive stuff, but is dependent on a FTIR screen which it looks like you have to build yourself unless you can find someone to do it for you. However this might be an excellent 10% project at work for me, some of the modes of interaction I’ve been experimenting with for navigating large graphs of data would be more intuitive with a multi-touch interface … wow … *me has a cunning plan*.

Microsoft Surface

Posted on by

Rob mentioned Microsoft Surface to me at lunch time, I had seen it on several blogs but   haven’t really had a chance to have a look at it. It’s very impressive technonology. as Rob points out its a combination of many different muli touch techniques that we’ve seen in other demonstrations over the last six or so months. As far as I’m aware this is the first commercial product to enter the market, and they’ve done a great marketing piece on it over at http://www.microsoft.com/surface

However if you want to see it an action, I found this product demo on YouTube. I was very impressed with how the surface interacts with real world objects like camera’s, for example, placing a digital camera on the table will automatically grab the photos off it.

Below is another demonstration of Surface, this time over at PopularMechanics

There more I see this in action the more I want one!