Hey NUI Group community!

I’m happy to announce publicly one part of my just-completed undergrad research project: the “rp-mt-scripts” multi-touch software system.  It’s a collection of scripts (with a graphical interface) that allows you to set up the most common multi-touch software on Linux (Ubuntu 9.04 was the design target so works best) in a single step, and easily update and run that software as well.  Basically, you can take a completely fresh install of Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty), follow those steps to run the software, and you’ll have a fully-functional setup automatically installed (with tbeta, standalone flash player, pymt from version control, and using setpwc if you have a phillips-based webcam) within about 30 minutes depending on your internet speed.

Please get the latest version from GitHub: http://github.com/rpavlik/rp-mt-scripts
If you are on Ubuntu 9.04, here’s your quick-start guide - in a terminal:

then either, depending on if you prefer a graphical interface or a command line one:

then click “Run configure and automatic install” (typing “install” when it asks you to confirm)
or

(similarly typing “install” when asked to confirm)

I have instructions and more information (including a screencast) on my project web site, though don’t use the snapshot download llinked there since it has a bug related to pymt updating:
http://compsci.snc.edu/cs460/pavlra/software/rp-mt-scripts/

I hope this can be useful to the community - Linux is a great environment to develop for, so making it easy to get started should help promote Linux-based development.  I personally used this to run demos and to develop software using PyMT, which is a great and fast-moving framework for multi-touch.

If you find any issues/bugs, or have a patch, please put it on GitHub on the Issues tab.  Thanks, and enjoy!

Screenshots:

(Currently this is copyrighted freeware, but I’m looking at a formal open-source license now.  You are welcome to use it and send me any patches.)

This looks quite interesting. I think I’m going to dive into trying this out tonight.

Any chance that other cameras could be forthcoming? PS3eye? Firewire cameras (I’ve been trying for five days to get my Sony Handycam to be read by Ubuntu 9.04)?

PS: An MIT (X-windows) license would be preferred IMO.

It should work with any camera that tbeta supports - it’s just that I had to configure my camera before using tbeta so I wrote a script that sets any pwc cameras to 320x240 @ 30fps.  If you don’t have that kind of camera, the camera param step will just error, but everything should still work fine.  (It doesn’t add support for anything that tbeta can’t handle itself - it just sets the framerate)

I don’t have any other kind of camera, so I couldn’t add settings support for those types, but I can imagine how that step would be done: instead of set_camera_parameters.sh throwing an error if it doesn’t see a pwc in the kernel log, it would fall through to another camera type detection.  Pretty straightforward, actually.

Yeah, was looking at the whole x11/MIT/BSD license thing, since it doesn’t really seem to need the GPL.

[edit: fix typo]

If you have downloaded and used the software, I’d love to hear from you - please post your experiences (success or failure, or questions) in this thread!

Well… unfortunately… I haven’t had a chance to do this… my MT plans are currently on hold while I help my wife. She went into the hospital on Weds PM and had our third baby boy preterm. They’re both doing well… but things have been pretty crazy as you might imagine. I will definitely be giving things a shot though once things settle down a bit.

Improved release uploaded to github, with all files licensed as X11/MIT license (open source) - enjoy!

Nice job done. Are you planning to extend this towards building a more generic MT-ready Linux system which includes most wanted and latest MT related apps, libs, tutorials and such?

PS: Please add your projects on wiki.nuigroup.com, if you haven’t done so