Last week—at the Museums and the Web conference in Denver—our multitouch table bared all. A clear plexiglass side panel allowed conference attendees to see all of the components inside. Ever since we built our first table back in 2008, we have continued to make big improvements.

Just recently we’ve moved to i7 architecture in our custom computer unit, giving us 60+ simultaneous touch points. In addition, we’ve added super-bright IR LEDs—which are 20 times as bright as the LEDs available when our table first came out.  These powerful LEDs “flood” our illumination system with IR making the table perform great under a variety of lighting conditions.  (Beyond hardware, our software package has also improved: now our GestureWorks framework for Flash and Flex, and our editable CollectionViewer and Google Mapping exhibit software are included.)

You can see the full specifications for our MT-50 Multitouch Table on our Website. We have pictures from the conference below. If you’d like to see more photos and a short video, check out the Ideum photostream on Flickr.

The custom computer got a clear plexiglass panel too.

The New Mexico Technology Excellence awards recognize “exceptional individual and organizational excellence in technology throughout the State.” We’re honored that two of our projects, the 100″ multitouch table exhibit and GestureWorks (our multitouch framework for Flash & Flex), are finalists for the awards.

Sponsored by the New Mexico Technology Council, the NM TechEX awards help to fund technology education for K-12 students in New Mexico. This year’s awards focus on two categories: Solution Innovation, for novel technologies that have potential for future impact, and Solution Impact, focusing on solutions that have already had a demonstrable impact on an individual or community level.

We’re glad to be a part of continuing efforts to build the technology community in New Mexico, and look forward to seeing everyone at the ceremony May 6.

I went out this weekend to the newly renovated Oakland Museum of California (OMCA). Each of three disciplines (art, history and natural sciences) occupies its own floor, and the exhibit space for each is currently undergoing extensive remodeling. The art and history galleries are set to open in May, and both sections now feature a custom MT-50 multitouch table.

The history table has custom rust-colored panels, which look great with the antique California maps, gold rush-era artifacts and wood panelling that surrounds it. The history table will feature a custom mapping application, built using Flash and GestureWorks, that will allow visitors to explore points of interest in California–centered on a historical map–and magnify them using a component built specially for the app.

The art table is currently in a section of the gallery that features folk and outsider art. With its sleek white panels, it fits right in, and Stamen Design is creating a custom application for the table that allows visitors to further explore California artists. Rather than go with the standard art gallery neutrals, OMCA has chosen to paint certain walls throughout the gallery vivid colors (you can see that golden wall in the image above), and the effect is really striking.

The museum opening is May 1st -2nd. If you’re in the Bay Area, you should definitely come check out the museum’s amazing remodel for yourself!

The new Imaginarium Discovery Center at the Anchorage Museum is set to open May 22^nd, and one of our exhibit technicians, Chris, was lucky enough to get a sneak peek when he went up this past weekend to install a MT-50 Multitouch Table.

The new Imaginarium has over 9,000 feet of exhibit space, with several galleries focusing on different scientific disciplines. The MT-50 will be part of the Earth and Life Sciences gallery. Designed in conjunction with Ansel Associates, the gallery will feature touch tanks, an aquarium and even alligators. Reptiles can’t survive in tundra climates, so for some native Alaskans, the gallery displays could be their first reptile sighting ever!

The MT-50 features a custom multitouch multiuser exhibit, designed by the Imaginarium & Ideum using Adobe Flash and GestureWorks, that allows visitors to compare and contrast two different species of animal by dragging their pictures into a spherical information interface in the center. Many of the animals in the virtual table exhibit will be featured in the live animal exhibits or can be seen in Alaska wilderness areas, allowing visitors to learn more about animals they can actually observe.

We’ve just released a new version of our GestureWorks multitouch authoring framework. The new version 1.5 provides support for Adobe Flex as well as Flash CS5, which Adobe plans to release later this year. The CS5 support means GestureWorks now works natively with Flash Player 10.1(beta), in addition to the included FLOSC and Windows 7 bridges.

Our company originally developed GestureWorks to help speed the development of our own multitouch projects and installations. We provide GestureWorks as a powerful tool for efficient multitouch development in Flash (and now Flex!) because we assume that most people would rather spend time developing awesome multitouch applications than spend days figuring out algorithms for specific gestures.

And GestureWorks provides a bevy of functions that Flash’s native API does not:

• multitouch support for Adobe Flex
• an open source gesture library with many built-in gestures
• concurrent gesturing (e.g. multiple simultaneous gestures may be performed on the same object)
• continuous transitional gesturing (e.g. can smoothly switch from one gesture to another mid-gesture)
• a method for tracking the change in position of the points
• a mechanism to determine point clustering, orientation, point/cluster history, and whether a cluster of points should be treated as a hand rather than discrete points
• selection algorithms for gesture determination
• application settings that allow developers to specify how the SDK receives touch event data, without having to change the project’s existing code base
• elegant degradation from multitouch to dual-touch to non-multitouch-enabled systems

If you’d like to see what can be done with GestureWorks, take a look at the Google Map and Flickr Mashup we recently developed with California Science Center.

If you buy GestureWorks, you’ll receive both the Flash and the Flex version. Past customers can download the new version for free. In addition to Flex and CS5 support, we now have more affordable pricing for individual commercial and educational licenses. You can download a free trial or purchase a copy on our online store.

You can visit the GestureWorks site to learn more about this new release.

I just posted a case study on the ExhibitFiles website. It examines the L.A. Zone multitouch table exhibit that we developed with California Science Center and details some of the design considerations we encountered in putting this multi-user exhibit together. You can read the complete case study here.

This custom exhibit was built using Adobe Flash with our Gestureworks multitouch framework and runs on our MT-50 multitouch table. There’s also more information about this exhibit on our portfolio page: “Visitors Explore Los Angeles in a Google Maps and Flickr Mashup.“