http://nuigroup.com/index.php/site/index/ en naturalui@gmail.com Copyright 2008 2008-11-23T04:11:00-05:00 http://nuigroup.com/log/multi_touch_water_screen/ http://nuigroup.com/log/multi_touch_water_screen/#When:05:11:00Z Jimihertz brings us a Multi Touch Water Screen- Which is a touch screen with a water curtain that flows over it allowing for very "fluid" interaction... literally. He has beeen working on multi-touch surfaces for quite a while now and sometimes got a bit frustrated by the lack of haptic sensation. So now there is very distinct feedback which equates to a more immersive and unique experience. Simple put ... jimi has the most realistic water ripples setup ever. Big congrats to Jimi and his team @ http://sassexperience.org Discuss it here: http://nuigroup.com/forums/viewthread/3628/ Community, News 2008-11-23T05:11:00-05:00 http://nuigroup.com/log/go_green/ http://nuigroup.com/log/go_green/#When:16:33:01Z We must collect as many green dots as possible in all regions, so send your peers a community link or reply to a new member's introduction... anything that will help spread an open vision of the future. Our goal is to directly impact the world through open education, collaboration and development of emerging interface techniques and theory. Whether its design, energy, optics or computer science we have come together to overcome all barriers. And now it has become our duty to introduce and redistribute ideas that bring us closer to a truly natural computing environment. So please continue expanding upon your dreams while sharing them with as many people as you can. Get involved in rich discussions that challenge typical thought... for the world needs open community in order to maintain freedom in technologies and standards. Plant an idea and paint the world green! Community Worldwide Statistics - Join the Discussion Community, News 2008-11-20T16:33:01-05:00 http://nuigroup.com/log/adobe_and_natural_user_interface_europe_09/ http://nuigroup.com/log/adobe_and_natural_user_interface_europe_09/#When:12:38:00Z          Last Wednesday the 11th of November I was invited by Adobe to come to their office in Germany to talk about multi-touch technology. I went there together with my NUI colleague Pradeep George to give a presentation to provide insight into the amazing paradigm switch that is taking place within the HCI field. One of the key things discussed was the opportunity to organize together a multi-touch event in Europe for Flash developers in 2009. Please vote in the community poll on the forums, if you are interested in attending such an event and if you want to have a say in the location of such an event hosted by Adobe and NUI. There we also got to meet with Georg Kaindl a multi-touch interaction designer from the University of Vienna who is also a accomplished member of the NUI Group Community. Georg gave some interesting insights in his vision and understanding of the change in HCI that is taking place. Also Thanks again to: Alex Ciorapciu who is the Technical Marketing Specialist for Adobe Germany, who welcomed us in a rainy but still pleasant Germany. Here a great entry from his blog post on the meeting: I encourage all Flash developers out there to get familiar with this new kind of devices, as it will heavily influence the market in the upcoming years. A quick quote from our conversations: “When our children will walk up to a display, they will touch it and expect to do something.” Adobe and NUI together will have some interesting things lined up on the very near future, of which you will hear more quite soon. I will keep you posted… for now here are some pictures from last year where NUI was present at Adobe Max in Chicago showcasing Adobe Flash powered applications: Community, News 2008-11-18T12:38:00-05:00 http://nuigroup.com/log/software_update_10_2008/ http://nuigroup.com/log/software_update_10_2008/#When:02:29:00Z Taha Bintahir and Paul D'Intino release touchWorldWind beta: This enables multi-touch in Nasa World Wind which lets you zoom from satellite altitude into any place on Earth. Leveraging Landsat satellite imagery and Shuttle Radar Topography Mission data, World Wind lets you experience Earth terrain in visually rich 3D, just as if you were really there. Virtually visit any place in the world. Look across the Andes, into the Grand Canyon, over the Alps, or along the African Sahara. This multitouch plugin is designed to provide a more Natural User Interface, where the user can naturally navigate through the environment using standard predefined gestures. This plugin allows the user to pan, zoom, rotate and tilt the globe, and lets you experience Earth terrain in visually rich 3D. Download it Now! Discuss it here: http://nuigroup.com/forums/viewthread/3441/ Georg Kaindl releases Touch'e Beta 3: First (and probably coolest) is native support for the format the NUI Group Flash demo apps use to receive tracking data (e.g. it’s outputting the format that tools like “flosc” create from TUIO output, but doing this directly in the app, obviating the need for the adapter server). This means that using a Flash demo with Touché is now as simple as launching Touché, then launching the Flash demo - it will connect to Touché automagically, without having to worry about anything. Also, you can now (optionally) choose a thresholding filter based on distance from a reference color. This is very useful if your touch blobs are not necessarily brighter or darker (luminance-wise) than the background, but have a distinct color instead. Alternatively, you could use this to “abuse” Touché into being a color marker tracker for non-multitouch projects. Another new thing is the ability to specify a maximum blob displacement between matched blobs in two consecutive frames, which is useful against the not-so-rare (especially if you’re using a camera at about 30fps or less, and multiple people are working on the multitouch table simultaneously) case that a finger is lifted off in the same video frame that another one is put down - if the blobs’ distance is larger than the threshold, they will not be matched, but a “touch up” and “touch down” call will be delivered instead. If you find that this is causing trouble with very fast motions, you can make the threshold higher (or lower, if the issue described in this paragraph still pops up). Download it Now! Discuss it here: http://nuigroup.com/forums/viewthread/3434/ Community, Software 2008-11-03T02:29:00-05:00 http://nuigroup.com/log/dubaiwall20/ http://nuigroup.com/log/dubaiwall20/#When:13:07:00Z With only 3 weeks between final client sign off and the deployment of a 20 foot multi-touch wall for Aldar Properties at the opening of Cityscape 2008 in Dubai. Globacore a Toronto based Interactive agency worked with NUI Consultant Taha Bintahir in engineering and deployment of a 20x3’ - 4 section LLP wall-installation. LLP stands for “Laser Light Plane” which is a technique of lighting the screen with IR lasers and specialized line lenses. This method was pioneered and actively research within our community and allows for affordable/scalable surface solutions while requiring less complexity in electronics for illumination. The key components of the setup include about thirty 10mw infrared lasers, 4 firefly MV cameras, 4 Sanyo 4500 lumen projectors, and Blue Ocean acrylic rear projection screens. NUI Group then provided a modified version of Touchlib for blob tracking as well as a media viewer app which was used Flash 10 and the AS3 TouchAPI.  Additionally a java server managed x,y,scale,and rotate properties of all objects on screen to simulate one continuous screen while actually running 4 independent computers and touchscreens. Thanks to all who made this huge feat possible and we are really looking forward to seeing more LLP used in even larger screens. Below are some more videos of the screen in use: Hardware, News, Video 2008-11-01T13:07:00-05:00 http://nuigroup.com/log/community_updatess/ http://nuigroup.com/log/community_updatess/#When:11:28:00Z Yet another amazing projects results from NUI Groups involvement with Google's Summer of Code event. Very stylist video! Alessandro De Nardi, a student of computer science at the University of Pisa, Italy, has worked on Grafiti for GsoC and is still involved with the project. Alessandro, a member of the NUI Group, is also in the Music Technology Group of Barcelona's UPF University, He was supervised by Martin Kalterbrunner and Sergi Jorda of the reactable project. Grafiti is a C# framework built on top of the TUIO protocol that manages multi-touch interactions in table-top interfaces. The possible use of tangible objects is particularly contemplated. It is designed to support the use of third party modules for (specialized) gesture recognition algorithms. However a set of modules for the recognition of some basic gestures is included in this project. The development is in the alpha state, going to beta soon. The goals I've been aiming at are: generality, versatility, speed of execution, extensibility, ease of programming (integration) of external modules (simple APIs and protocols) and effective interface design with regards to HCI aspects. More informations in his blog. Get the Source: http://code.google.com/p/grafiti/ Thanks Lynn Community, Research 2008-11-01T11:28:00-05:00 http://nuigroup.com/log/ms_vista/ http://nuigroup.com/log/ms_vista/#When:23:42:15Z At PDC today, Microsoft gave the first public demonstration of Windows 7. Until now, the company has been uncharacteristically secretive about its new OS; over the past few months, Microsoft has let on that the taskbar will undergo a number of changes, and that many bundled applications would be unbundled and shipped with Windows Live instead. Also Microsoft released Windows Azure... a "cloud computing" platform that aims to compete with Amazon's existing EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud). Whats new? Aero's Animation Engine New Taskbar Device Stage Home Groups Jump Lists Libraries Multi-Touch and Gesturing Support Unified Search Here are some related videos: 2008-10-28T23:42:15-05:00 http://nuigroup.com/log/snl_does_multitouch_comedy_to_perfection_with_cnns_magic_map/ http://nuigroup.com/log/snl_does_multitouch_comedy_to_perfection_with_cnns_magic_map/#When:18:46:00Z Saturday Night Live’s Fred Armisen takes CNN’s “Magic Map” to its logical—and hilarious—conclusion. What would happen if New Hampshire got moved down to Mexico? Partial Transcript, thanks to Lynn Marentette (http://interactivemultimediatechnology.blogspot.com/2008/10/multi-touch-parody-of-cnns-magic-map.html) “Now the country can be moved up and down, like so....We can also shrink it and put it in your pocket if you need to.” “Let’s look at Ohio. Lets look at the Cleveland area. Lets look really really close. Really close. Really really close, You can see the top of a warehouse. We’re really going to want look at that. Very, very important, were going to want to look at that.” “And here is New York.... New York was there in 2004, and you can shake it around like that.. (shakes New York)” “Check out Michigan… I can make it bounce!” (Drags down Michigan on the map, it bounces up and down once it reaches the bottom of the map.) Discuss it here: http://nuigroup.com/forums/viewthread/3334/ 2008-10-26T18:46:00-05:00 http://nuigroup.com/log/smart_bringing_touch_to_education_system/ http://nuigroup.com/log/smart_bringing_touch_to_education_system/#When:09:30:00Z SMART Table - Touch... Learn... Together. SMART introduces first interactive table for primary students new tables enables small group learning and collaboration learning center, a ground-breaking learning display designed specifically for preschool to sixth grade (ages 4 to 11) students. The new product is a brightly colored table with a touch-sensitive surface where groups of students can simultaneously interact with digital content. Working together to complete interactive lessons, play educational games and solve problems, students think the interactive learning center is fun and easy to use, and their teachers find it educational. For example, a teacher can introduce a concept on an interactive whiteboard and then ask students in small groups to explore it further on a SMART Table. The SMART Table contains a customized PC and a projection system that are turned on with a single button. It has a built-in 27" (69-cm) screen (on the diagonal) that can read simultaneous input from an unlimited number of fingers or pen tools. At 29" (73 cm) wide and 25" (65 cm) high, the SMART Table is ideal for small groups to work around without crowding. It ships with a standard set of interactive learning applications, interactive lesson activities and educational games. Independent software and content developers have already recognized the potential of the SMART Table and are creating additional content for it, which will be available with the product in spring 2009 for $8,000 USD. Video Link Interface, News 2008-10-22T09:30:00-05:00 http://nuigroup.com/log/community_updates2/ http://nuigroup.com/log/community_updates2/#When:08:13:00Z (Ubertouch) - Claytronics - Physical Dynamic Rendering - Join the Discussion Autodesk Labs Brian Mathews and Multi-touch - Youtube CityWall Hki - Youtube Markerless 3D Tracking - Youtube Community, News 2008-10-21T08:13:00-05:00