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.

Rosco grey under acrylic

On Monday we had blobs but no projection on the acrylic, so we had the idea to put rosco grey underneath the acrylic, and the result was not what we expected, in a positive way.
As you can see the projection is good and it does not interfere with the quality of the blobs.








After some more testing the configuration of Tbeta and touchlib was all set and done.

Some exta tests

After some small tests we came to the conclusion the harder we stretched sulky solvy over the acrylic the better blobs we got.



After stretching Sulky Solvy we didn't need to press as hard as before.
You still have to use a bit of force.

Testing with Sulky and Rosco

The next test we did was with a pirce of rosco grey on top of the Sulky Solvy



As you can see with rosco on top of Sulky Solvy the result is even worse then before.
We'll still experiment with this in Tbeta to see if we can get any usefull blobs.

Testing with Sulky Solvy

Today we wanted to test with Sulky Solvy applied on top of the acrylic.

We had many expectations, afther reading allot of it on Nuigroup.



So as you can see in the video we recorded, the results were very disappointing but it's possible we might did something wrong, forgot somthing, or just need to test some more.

In the second video we removed the IR bandpass filter to see if it would make any difference.



So as you can see in this video even without the bandpass filter there is not much difference.

Blob's!

We still need to make some configuration adjustment (fine-tuning) but the result we get now is very promising.

note: this is on bare acrylic!

IR ribbon is working fine

Low FPS in Tbeta

Another 'problem' we encountered last week was that the frame rate in Tbeta was very low, only 5 frames per second (as you can see in the picture), this is way to low, we should at least have 30fps.




By pressing the spacebar you can enter the mini mode of Tbeta, and as you can see in the picture the frame rate now is 30fps constantly. This is the result we want.



The cause of this is just guessing, but it could be that our pc's performance might not be good enough, it's a P4 with 2Gig RAM.
The pentium 4 might not be as good as the Dualcores, but for now it should do the trick.

Unofficial Touchlib Reference

This also will sure come in handy.

Touchlib documentation.

http://www.multigesture.net/wp-content/uploads/Touchlib_Reference.pdf

google code pages:

http://code.google.com/p/touchlib/

How to run touchlib (windows)

Installing Touchlib on Windows

Installing Touchlib on Windows XP/Vista

Requirements
Flash Player 9
Visual Studio 2005 SP1 x86 redistributable package

Please make sure your camera is properly setup within Windows before continuing with the follow steps.

---

1. Download the latest version of Touchlib from http://nuigroup.com/touchlib/downloads/


2. Open the zip file and extract touchlib_beta_v*.* folder to your desktop.


3. Execute config.bat
   
   • Hit B to perform background subtraction
   • Hit Enter to perform calibration
   • Hit ESC when you are complete with calibration
   • The config application has now saved your settings into touchlib/config.xml
   • Also see: Touchlib configapp
   
   
4. Now everything from previous step should be closed..
   
   • Execute server.bat
   • Execute vision.bat
   
   
5. Go into the clients folder and choose an application to test. Your input device should now register touch events within Flash.

Source: http://nuigroup.com/wiki/Installing_Touchlib_on_Windows/

Touchlib error

We were able to run Tbeta in windows without a problem, but we also wanted to try out Touchlib, but every time we tried to run it on a pc it gave the following error.



So I downloaded the needed DLL from http://www.dll-files.com/dllindex/dll-files.shtml?msvcr71
I copied it to C:\Windows\System32

and tried to run it again, but still the same error...

Then I tried to copy the dll directly in the Touchlib folder, but still the same result.

After some searching on the internet I downloaded this:
Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Redistributable Package (x86)

But the result was still the same,

The version of touchlib we were running was V2.0, and version V1.0 worked without a problem.
So I copied the missing dll from the V1.0 folder to the V2.0 folder.

And it worked.

you can download V1.0 from here:
http://nuigroup.com/touchlib/downloads/

Webcam lens

It's been a while since our last update of our blog.
Last week we went to Cebit in Hannover (Germany) which was very interesting and there where plenty of (multi-)touch applications there, some in very large scale.

The last thing we did before our 'break' was place the IR ribbon around the acrylic, the acrylic arrived about one week ago, so we tested it right away with our IR ribbon.

The first results were not so promising and the result could be better, a lot better.
Our main problem is that the webcam gives a very blurry image, I'll add pictures of that so you know what i mean.
Because of the blurry image we could not get bright or clear blobs, and we could not know for sure what the problem was of the 'weak blobs', the bad lens or the IR ribbon?

So today we experimented a little with the webcam and the lens to see what could cause the blurry image.
The solution is, that you do not have to screw the lens all the way to the bottom, you need to screw it in just the right amount so that the focus is good.
I'll add a picture of the image we get now, the result is just what we expected.

Problem:


Result:




So this is the lens without IR filter!, it's not very clear to see the difference with a normal lens, but later on I'll take some some pictures So you can clearly see why you need this lens.