Ryan & I went to AVFX to work on some video wall solutions. I have never seen so much equipment in my life.

This wall was amazing. The have the whole system is running through Watchout. They way we got our app on there was via a DA. The NEC screens are able to grid the source, this kinda worked. The resolution gets is very strange, not to mention the aspect ration. I was able to fix this by reducing the x scale of the openGL world.


We also tried out these Orion LCD’s they are pretty cool. What I am concluding is that in order to do real time graphics from a single machine you need a serious GPU, rumor on the street there is a four headed Nvidia out there. I was able to connect two displays (HD) on the Mac via one graphics card and it ran the app great. The second I plugged in a third display and had the app span across multiple graphics cards the FPS dropped to about 5. I have found big wall application is very hard to do on a mac because of card limitations. I may be thinking of trying out a PC system.

The Vision Show was in Boston this week. What an interesting conference, most people were there to find the latest in machine vision solutions. We were there to find the best hardware solutions for our tables and pieces, Ohh man we did! People were so helpful to figure out what we could use in our work. Imagine Source taught us a ton and evan gave us a free camera. Can’t wait to try out some of the things we found.


This is the camera that Imagine Source gave us. It is unreal, 1024 x 768 resolution capturing at a solid 30 fps.

The had some funky face tracking set up. haha Check out all the photos from the show here buy cialisbuy cialisbuy levitrabuy levitrabuy propeciabuy propeciabuy somabuy somabuy levitrabuy cialisbuy propeciabuy levitrabuy somabuy cialisbuy propeciabuy levitrabuy somabuy cialisbuy levitrabuy propeciabuy soma

Just go back from Atlanta doing an installation for the SCMX music festival. The piece was installed under a tent on two HD 52″ LCD displays. The image was beautiful 1080p and super bright.

As people stand in front of the displays they were able to interactive with drifting bubbles filled with other small bubbles. You were able to pop the bubbles and have the inside bubbles pour over your contour. As you would move around dust would float off of you and every so often a ribbon would fly away based on your movement.

It was a interesting installation, our first time dealing with the sun and the elements of the outdoors. The piece will be touring around to the rest of the SCMX. More and better documentation to follow.

Video
Photo set
Application Renderings

Working on a new piece, these are some early renderings. There are two video streams seamed together were particles and motion graphics come alive as you move around.

The lab was just written up in Creativity magazine. Unfortuantly Creativity doesn’t let you see their articles after 7 days. They never got the memo that the internet is free.

Download a PDF here.

We had some kids come in today, they got to see what we do and try out some of the toys. You can learn a ton watching kids interact with this table. It was amazing watching them learn how to use the table with no explanation. They would teach each other as they figured out new features. I have a ton of new ideas to take from this.

I want to get some feedback on how to do a proper and simple calabration for a multitouch system. I am going to try and walk you through the process and construction of the table. Here is the main setup for the table. For the most part the table is working check out latest video. The blobs are showing up and somewhat consistent. Better adjustment of IR would fix this.

This is what the projection looks like. The throw of the projection is much larger than the table top. This is where the problem I think starts. I need to align the physical touch points to the projected touch points.

To get the correct image to track I perform a warping technique. I drag the four points of a quad to the four corners of the table. This creates a 640 x 480 warped image where pixel 0,0 is the top left hand corner. I think that this works well and does the job for the most part. It is on the other hand the most processor intensive part of the application. The distortion of the image is not terrible. I have tried Stefanix’s checkerboard calibration but do not completely understand how it applies other than compensate for wide angle distortion in the camera.

More info in photo notes

So now that we have a corrected image to track I need to match the projection to the tabletop. We do a very simalar calibration, this does not feel correct but works. You drag the four points of a quad warping the openGL world to the table. This for the most part works but the distortion of the GL world is weird. There must be a better way to do this.

I have been looking into all the techniques done by other systems like TouchLib and Reactivision. Most are a four point or many point touch calibration system. I have not completely figured this out, this is where I ask for help. What is the best way to do this calibration and setup?

This is a project built with Ryan Habbyshaw. The piece allows you to be someone or something else for a moment. As the user walks by the piece finds their face and eyes replacing them with a new image. It is so priceless watching peoples reaction as Yoda shows up as their face. I love this project. Check out the photo set here and the video here.

Here is a new video of the Touch Table. We are working on a classic multi-touch photo appm, there are bugs but we are working them out. We have a set of photos growing here.

Thanks to Ryan Habbyshaw and The OF Team.

Working on a simple multitouch display. This is a small prototype next I want to scale the screen up. I will have more soon.