Light pollution

We had some problems when there was a external source of IR light right above our table, so we tried to place a IR blocking foil on top of the acrylic, just like the one they use on the windows in office buildings.

The result is not so good as we thought it would be, because the foil is on top of the acrylic it would not interfere with the IR light that that refracts to the webcam, but we need to press very hard to get weak blob's.



So this is not the best solution to block surrounding IR light.

We hope to find something that will work as IR blocker and still let's us have good blob's.

Automatisation of startup

We also needed to make the startup of all the programs needed to control the multi-touch screen, so we decided to write some code in C#.

What happens in the code is the following.

1: startup of tbeta
2: simulate removing bacground by pressing 'b'
3: minimize tbeta screen for max fps (spacebar)
4: startup of multitouchvista processes in the right order.
5: we move all processes to the background (except tbeta for so far)
6: we write a logfile so you can track what events occurred and what not.
7: we kill all processes when you restart the program.

for more information on the code you can always ask us.

Update

It's been a while since our last update, but we sure made some progress in the meanwhile.

We completely closed the table with wooden panels, so no external light can disturb with the working of out table.





We successfully installed MultTouchVista and made it work with Tbeta as an input device (sends TUIO to MultiTouchVista).
So now we use the standard built in multi-touch function of Windows7.

We installed google earth to play around with :P, and we also tried to install Nasa Worlwind and the multi-touch plugin, but for some reason (we think: not supported driver) it won't start up at all, so we can't test with it.

We installed Bumptop for a more multi-touch experience, it has some cool functions.

windows 7 and Multitouchvista

In our previous post you can see our first demo,

There are some small differences in our setup since our last video's,

We upgraded our pc from a P4 to a Dual core developers machine, Tbeta runs much smoother now.
We also installed Windows7 on it. Why? Because Windows 7 supports Multi touch input.

The only problem is that Windows does not know that we made a multi touch screen, it just sees a independent projector and webcam, so we need to tell Windows that there are Multiple (touch) inputs possible, multiple inputs as in, we connect 4 different mouses to the pc and each user can control it's own mouse and do different things with it.

One way, and as far as we know, the only way at this moment is to install MultiTouchVista.
This project is still in alpha phase, we need to compile the solutions ourself.

But for some reason we can't seem to get it working, and that is what we are figuring out now.

Demo

Today we recorded our 1ste real demo.
Enjoy!

Running demo application

We placed the rosco grey under the acrylic and did a calibration in Tbeta.



Then we tried to run a demo application which eventually worked.

We thoroughly followed the steps on this site and it worked, we've also made a video of this and we'll try to upload it because it was filmed with a cellphone.

Our demo application worked!



Now we can go on with the fine-tuning.

(Sorry for the bad quality)

Test with rosco grey on top of sulky solvy

Today we wanted to test some more with sulky solvy on top of the acrylic and on top of that rosco grey.

We tough we could get some better results when we really stretched the sulky solvy realy hard over the acrylic, and kept it there with some double sided tape on the 4 edges.
But we soon decided to get rid of it.

Here is a picture of this test.

We decided to go for our other solution with the rosco grey under the acrylic.