Last night, at the American Association of Museums Annual Conference MUSE Awards in Los Angeles, our Electromagnetic Spectrum 100″ Multitouch Table Exhibit, developed with Adventure Science Center, won a bronze AAM MUSE award in the Interactive Kiosk category. We are honored to have been selected. Congratulations to the Adventure Science Center team and congrats to all of the MUSE Award winners.
Below is a video of the exhibit which we released last fall. I wrote a case study about the EM Spectrum exhibit that is available on the ExhibitFiles website; see “Space Imaging Multitouch Multiuser.”
Next week will be a busy one as we will be exhibiting at the American Association of Museums (AAM) conference in LA and attending the Society for Information Design (SID) in Seattle.
If you’re attending the AAM Monday night party, you can check out our multitouch table in action at The Getty! They developed a custom exhibit using our own GestureWorks framework for Flash. The Getty’s Iris blog has a story about the exhibit, see: Exploring Los Angeles on a Multitouch Table.
On Wednesday night, off to Seattle for the SID annual conference. Thursday is The Future of Touch & Interactivity Conference, with keynotes from multitouch “rock stars” Bill Buxton, Principle Researcher from Microsoft and Jeff Han from Perceptive Pixel. It should be an interesting day.
We will be tweeting from both GestureWorks and Ideum and using #AAM10 and #SID2010, if you’d like to follow. If you’re attending either of these conferences and would like to meet up, let us know.
We’ve just posted a new video of our MT-50 multitouch table on YouTube. The previous one had gotten a bit dated as we’ve continued to improve and upgrade the table since its initial release last July.
The new video highlights performance gains (60+ points!), durability (yes, we dropped a bowling ball on the table surface), and the ease of development on the MT-50 platform (important for designers, developers, researchers, and museums who want to create their own custom multitouch applications). Each table includes our own GestureWorks framework for Adobe Flash and Flex, plus our customizable Collection Viewer and a configurable Google Maps and Flickr application. In addition, the MT-50 multitouch table supports authoring in any language that supports the TUIO protocol. You can check out the MT-50 Specifications for full details.
There are many devices that claim to be multitouch, but only a few that can actually handle more than two points. Which is why we were anxiously awaiting our 20-point capacitive multitouch screen from 3M.
3M claims a >6 millisecond response time for all 20 fingers. Minus a millisecond stopwatch, we can vouch that the screen is highly responsive. Not to mention, we were able to get the screen to track 50 (yes, that’s five-oh) touch points within a GestureWorks-built app. And all of the apps that we originally built for our 50″ MT-50 Multitouch Table looked great on the high-resolution screen. It’s good to have true multitouch.
A lot has been said about Apple’s closed-door policy in regards to Flash development for the iPad and iPhone. I’m not talking about Apple supporting Flash on the devices but rather the decision to close off the Apple Store to apps created in Adobe’s CS5. Several reasons Apple’s decision have been cited: Apple would have to deal a flood of apps in their store, third-party authoring will lead to substandard apps and will “hinder the progress of the platform,” or Flash apps won’t perform as well particularly if Apple tries to add multitasking. I seriously doubt that any of these are correct.
I think that Apple simply didn’t want Flash developers to gain any kind of a foothold in designing for mobile and tablet devices. If Flash developers started to develop apps, they would begin to grapple with the UI issues that are inherent in creating programs for these new mobile and tablet devices. They would begin to incorporate multitouch events, develop and incorporate UI elements like dials and switches and become, as a group, much more savvy in regards to mobile development. They would have also created a slew of Flash-based apps ready for other mobile and tablet devices.
If Apple had allowed these Flash developers a head start designing for iPad and iPhone, they would have more easily been able to transition to the dozens of tablet-based devices and smart phones that have already been announced for later this year. Flash will run on Android 2.2, WebOS, Google Chrome, and WinOS, so the number of potential devices is vast. All of these will compete directly with the iPhone and iPad. The Android OS has already surpassed Apple’s iPhone OS in sales for the first quarter of the year.
By closing the Apple Store to Flash developers, Apple bought themselves some time; onlylater this year Flash will begin to compete directly with Apple. Our own GestureWorks multitouch framework for Flash will work with all these devices, so true multitouch is ready for mobile. It should be an interesting year.
We’ve added another tutorial to the GestureWorks site that covers how to build a multitouch Google Map application from start to finish. One of the more complex tutorials, it extends the Google Maps API, allowing the user to scale, rotate and “fly to” specific areas. The tutorial also describes how to use our 3-D tilt gestures take advantage of Google Maps’ 3-D features, and how to set map properties within the application.
We’ve built a few of these applications for clients, and look forward to seeing other variations on the Google Maps application as multitouch becomes more and more common. Next week our developer showcase launches. If you’ve built an app using GestureWorks and want it to be considered for the showcase, contact us.
Tonight a group from Ideum headed up to Santa Fe for the New Mexico Technology Council’s Tech Ex Awards. The awards celebrate technological achievement and innovation by New Mexico companies and individuals.
We were the only organization that were finalists for two Solution Innovation awards; one for our multitouch Flash framework GestureWorks, and another for our EM Spectrum 100″ multitouch table exhibit. We were in illustrious company, as Intel, HP, APS, and others were also nominated. Last year, we won a NM Tech Award for our first-generation multitouch table.
Only four awards were given and GestureWorks was one of them! Congratulations to all of the winners and nominees.
We played a small part in the opening, as both the Art and History galleries have exhibits that run on our multitouch tables. We worked with Oakland Museum to design and develop software for the California Land Grab exhibit found in the History gallery. This multitouch and multiuser exhibit allows visitors to view high-resolution historical maps of California and other documents. This application was developed with our own GestureWorks framework for Adobe Flash. Below are some photographs of the California Land Grab exhibit. There are more photographs of this exhibit and our multitouch tables on the Ideum Flickr stream.
A lot of newspaper articles covered the weekend opening, you can find a complete listing on the Oakland Museum website. One article in particular that caught my attention was in the Contra Costa Times, who published a map of the new galleries with descriptions and photos showing exhibits of interest. Check out Oakland Museum, 2.0 The Layout to get an overview of the new galleries.
A lot has 
