I’ve seen a few posts relating to local meetings, including those in Silicon Valley, France, and Malaysia. To help bring together people in my geographic area interested in or working on multitouch/NUI devices and code, I’ve decided to host an event. I would like to encourage others to do the same (if you aren’t already). I have really enjoyed the learning opportunity that the NUI Group has provided, and would like to share it with more people. Who knows, maybe we can even get a few more local kids interested in STEM careers, and convince them to start creating video games, instead of just playing them.

Local meeting for Kentucky
When: Thursday, January 21, 2010. 6:30-8 pm
Where: Awesome Inc, 348 E. Main St, Lexington, KY, USA
Discussion: History of touch, what’s going on with NUI, share what individuals are working on.
Contact: Nick (aerosuch), see http://www.awesomeinc.org for more details.

PS: just found out that Sam Hurst, founder of Elo Touch, is a local guy.

Multitouch Kentucky has 34 people planning to attend tonight’s event (multitouchky.eventbrite.com). I’ll let you all know how it goes.

Has anyone else had success with local meetings? Any other ways to enhance the NUI Group community and get more people developing touch screen technology and applications?

Multitouch Kentucky mini-conference was a success! Flickr pics from the event.

We had about 30 attendees, including students, professors, and local professionals. There were even enough IEEE members in attendance to qualify as a section meeting! Awesome Inc’s outdoor touch screen was functional, but not complete, using a halogen lamp as a rear DI infrared source.

Discussion:

Touch hardware options
Incident lighting
Higher resolution cameras
Display stitching
Syncing illumination with camera

Market applications for touch screens
UV reflective markers (oh, maybe that’s for mirror whiteboards)
Collaboration: Military strategy, engineering construction, city planning
Body simulator for medical training
Retail
Reactable: music generations
Kiosk – scale
Video Games
Food service
Bring markers to UI, find in real life

Future human/device/info interfaces
Sixth sense – wearable devices
Cyclical trends: Mainframe and terminal, PC, Cloud computing and Netbook
Thought-controlled: is that good? Do we want that experience?
What info will we be accessing, and why? New functions of computers?

Overall, the local meeting was a great experience. We look forward to having another local meetup, and encourage others to do the same!

Nice start fellas
hope all goes well
Regards
Tim