We’ve recently updated our video for the MT55 Pro multitouch table. There is new footage showing table custom colors: red and opal green. We also added some footage showing Tune Grid our multitouch music sequencer application built with Gestureworks.
In the session, I’m going to be talking about the multitouch Gulf Oil Spill Mashup application that we produced last summer and provided free of charge to museums and aquariums. The application was built with the GestureWorks multitouch SDK and many of the software components in the application available free on the Open Exhibits website.
In case you missed it, here’s a video of the application in action.
I will post my slides here following my presentation. Looking forward to hearing how others in the museum community responded to Gulf Coast oil spill.
Updated May 24, 2010: It was a great session to be part of and I found the other presentations really inspiring. In particular, I really enjoyed the talk by Jerry Enzler, the Executive Director of the National Mississippi River Museum & Aquarium. Last summer, their institution opened a major exhibit on the Gulf of Mexico. Their large aquarium tanks were deliberately presented with no fish or any marine life. The tanks were covered with decals representing oil from the spill.
It was a great example of a museum (and aquarium) taking risks and making a strong statement about the environmental disaster that occurred in the gulf. The opening of this unique exhibit was a great success and the story appeared in the national news. At the time, there were stories about the exhibit in MSNBC, USA Today, and many other media outlets.
I hope to post more about the session in the future, as all of the presentations were very interesting. For now, here are the slides from my presentation, Gulf Oil Spill Mashup Exhibit (PDF 3.7 MB)
This will be the last installment of this series on our multitouch wall project here at the Ideum studio. Next month, we’ll be able to show you the exhibit installed. For the last two weeks we’ve been working on blending the two high-resolution images and the infrared illumination and tracking. Also, yesterday we began to pack up the pieces for shipping.
Blending the two high-resolution projectors has taken a bit of time. The two projectors are dVision 35 WQXGA XB LED projectors by Digital Projection. The blending hardware is also from Digital Projection. The combined resolution of our round, 7 foot projected images is 2560 x 2560. Before settling on a hardware solution, we tried a few different blending methods using software. One of the software methods we first explored, used corners of the two projected images to calibrate. Sort of a non-starter when your image is round! The blending hardware we are using is Digital Projection’sFusion 3D hardware.
In the photograph above you can see one of the calibration tests. Paul Lacey (Senior Multitouch Engineer at Ideum) and Chris Steinmetz (Support Specialist at Ideum) are examining a test blend.
Infrared Illumination and tracking was another major challenge. As we mentioned in our last blog post (See Part 3), we’re using low-powered lasers for illumination. For tracking we are using NUITEQ’s SnowFlake Software. The software will use the four cameras (See Part 2) to track the IR touch points on the wall’s surface. The IR cameras we are using are from Point Grey.
The photograph above shows a calibration test using Snowflake software which works with Point Grey cameras and supports four camera input.
Finally, packing up all of these materials for shipment is a major task in itself. Many of the items are extremely fragile, such as the 7 foot acrylic projection screen. Others, like the large ring are just hard to handle and move.
The round acrylic projection surface needed to be wrapped very carefully for transport.
The 10mm haptic glass is both fragile (when not mounted) and heavy.
The ring itself is several hundred pounds. Here we are preparing it to be moved.
In the next post, we’ll show you the installation! Also, we’ll finally be able to share the name of the aquarium that has partnered with us to develop the exhibit. (They gave permission to share the progress, but wanted their name kept private until the exhibition opens.) To see the previous steps in the process check out: Building a High-Resolution Multitouch Wall Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.
Over on Open Exhibits, we’ve just released a new template called the Magnifier Viewer. The template has an integrated multitouch-enabled magnifier object that can be used with a variety of media items such as images and Google Maps. We’ve been looking to integrate this magnifier into Open Exhibits and make it available to the community ever since we developed it for the California Mapping exhibit with Oakland Museum last year.
The Magnifier Viewer has different styled magnifiers (round or square, brass or silver, handles or no handles) that can be changed via XML settings. This flexible template can be used to create a variety of custom exhibits. Just add media and customize the XML and you’re ready to go.
This template and a dozen other software modules are available free on the Open Exhibits site. Museums, students, universities, and non-profits can get the Open Exhibits Core SDK for free too. Comercial users will need the GestureWorks framework to use the free modules. Open Exhibits and GestureWorks require Adobe Flash or Flex.
We’ll be showing how to use this template and other software modules at an Open Exhibits bootcamp workshop next week at Museums and the Web conference in Philadelphia.
This video demonstrates the results of a recent collaboration between SENSUS and our own Open Exhibits software initiative. The concept is simple: make networking and sharing transparent across multitouch devices and operating systems. The demo video shows an Android Tablet (Samsung Galaxy), a Multitouch Table (our own, new MT55), a Windows 7 multitouch kiosk, and an iPod–all sharing media items (images, video, and a Google Map) effortlessly. This easy sharing is made possible with Konnectus software which is a new cloud-computing platform developed by SENSUS.
The Konnectus software and the Open Exhibits modules will be available later this summer. And, Yes! These “network friendly” software modules will also work with our GestureWorks multitouch framework.
Here’s a bit more about Konnectus and our partners at SENSUS…
KonnectUs is a new cloud-computing software platform by SENSUS designed to make sophisticated networking functions easy and intuitive for users across a range of devices including multitouch tables, desktop computers, tablets, and mobile phones. KonnectUs “Natural Networking Technology (NNT)” empowers users to connect seamlessly across all major platforms – from Windows to Android to iOS. The new software aims to deliver a desktop user experience for key cloud-based services such as file sharing, social networking and location-relevant distribution of content. Additionally, KonnectUs APIs allow developers the opportunity to leverage the power of SENSUS networking technology through integration into third party applications.
We’ve made a great deal of progress since our last blog post on the multitouch wall project (see: Building a Multitouch Wall (Part 2)). The big news is that we’ve completed an illumination test and the image looks really great! The exhibit is using dVision 35 WQXGA XB LED projectors by Digital Projection. These awesome, short throw projectors have a resolution of 2560 x 1600. The combined resolution of the round 7-foot, multitouch wall will be better than HD at 2560 x 2560.
To mount these two projectors, we designed custom, adjustable projector mounts out of aluminum. These mounts –along with the cameras and first-surface mirrors– connect to the aluminum rigging we designed (mentioned in the last installment). All of these pieces need to fit and work within a tight 3 foot space!
In the last blog post, I mentioned that we are using 10mm haptic tempered glass fronting a piece of acrylic with projection material that will go directly behind it. The acrylic is from Draper it is 1/4″ Cine 13 Optical Coating it has a dark grey tint. Locating 84″ of projection material that was seamless, was one of the challenges we faced in developing this exhibit.
For our illumination test we displayed an early version of the software. The exhibit will allow visitors to “touch” plankton and learn more about them. As I mentioned in a previous post, this exhibit is going to be installed in a major North American aquarium. (We have received permission from them to share the development process as long as we don’t divulge their name.)
Finally, we have designed and fabricated all of the laser mounts for the outside wall. The image above shows a close-up. There are 8 laser mounts with a total of 16 lasers creating two interlaced grids. The lasers are 5mW, similar in power to a laser pointer. These lasers will be used to track visitors fingers and hands as they interact with the wall (it is a method called Laser Light Plane (LLP). This application of LLP is completely safe; along with the low power, these laser will not come in contact with visitor’s eyes. A metal flange will completely cover the laser mounts.
In our next installment we will show you how we are blending the two high-resolution images together. To see the previous steps in the process check out: Building a High-Resolution Multitouch Wall Part 1 & Part 2.
Back in November, I first blogged about building a 7-foot, round, high-resolution multitouch wall. At that point in the process we had just received the large ring and built the computer system. Now, we have installed the glass and have built out the rigging for the cameras and projectors.
The glass is haptic: it has a texture, doesn’t show fingerprints, and still displays the image beautifully. We purchased the glass from a company called Sevasa. They make an acid-etched architectural glass that has a great feel to it. The tempered glass is 10mm thick.
Due to the size of the glass, we are not adhering the project material directly on to the glass, but rather we have a piece of acrylic with projection material that will go directly behind the glass. We have already done projection test and the combination works great. (I will post more about that once we put the acrylic in place.)
Behind the 7-foot ring, we have built a rigging frame out of Bosch aluminum. The rigging holds the four IR (infrared) cameras in place. It will also hold the projectors in place.
We will be using an IR method called Laser Light Plane (LLP) illumination. The system will have four cameras that will gather the tracking information. The exhibit will be installed in early summer, it is being built for a major North American aquarium. We will post another update on this project in the next week or two.
To see the previous step in the process check out: Building a High-Resolution Multitouch Wall Part 1.
Over on the Open Exhibits website, Jeff Heywood of Vancouver Aquarium has just shared a comprehensive field study on two multitouch tables in the Canada’s Arctic gallery space. The study was developed by The InnoVis Group, Interactions Lab at the University of Calgary.
We built the tables and worked with Vancouver Aquarium back in the summer of 2009 to create the software. The report looks at the “general experience of the digital tables”, including the form factor, and then it takes a closer look at the applications.
The study shows, as Jeff points out in his post, that “not everything was a success with the tables, but they are, overall, successful.” Considering the emergent nature of these types of exhibits, we were pleased to see that the study was generally very positive.
Still, some things didn’t work as well we would have liked. There were significant usability issues with the early version of the Collection Viewer. I’m happy to report that many of the issues cited in the report have been fixed in the newer version of the Collection Viewer that is available on the Open Exhibits site. We built in the ability to easily change some of the design parameters via XML. For example, button size and spacing can be modified by changing the XML. In addition, we remapped many of the gestures, so that the Collection Viewer objects respond better to visitor interaction. Still, some issues remain and we’ll be taking a closer look at this report and making additional changes.
Studies like this are incredibly valuable (and far too rare in the field). As designers and developers, we can only learn so much through testing and observation in the studio. The museum (or aquarium) setting and the sheer number and range of different visitors provides us with a new picture of the exhibit. You can download and read the full report on the Open Exhibits website, Interactive Tables at the Vancouver Aquarium.
The New Media Consortium has published the 2010 Horizon Report: Museum Edition which “identifies and describes emerging technologies likely to have a large impact over the coming five years on a variety of sectors around the globe.”
A section on Gesture-Based Computing caught my eye for obvious reasons. The report lists the time-to-adoption horizon for gesture-based computing as four to five years. We agree with many of the report’s findings, but since we’ve been involved in developing multitouch and multiuser applications for over two years now, I would move that timeline forward. Although what one would consider “adoption” and how widespread it is seems to be open to interpretation.
Below are a few of the points that we found especially interesting.
The report calls gesture-based computing a transformative technology.
“Because gesture-based computing changes not only the physical and mechanical aspects of interacting with computers, but also our perception of what it means to work with a computer, it is a transformative technology.”
It mentions the importance of allowing visitors to “manipulate objects” and how that is a “satisfying personal connection of an individual with the object. In addition, the report touches on the potential of collaborative interaction:
“Larger multi-touch displays support collaborative work, allowing multiple users to interact with content simultaneously, unlike a single-user mouse.”
The potential for collaborative work and communication between museum visitors in the report really should be expanded. Our experiences in developing multitouch exhibits has shown us that beyond “intuitive gestures,” multitouch means multiuser and well-constructed exhibits can encourage interaction between visitors. In fact, the interaction we’ve seen around multitouch tables is similar to the types of interaction one might expect from a hands-on science exhibit.
The report is worth checking out and there are a variety of links to examples of multitouch exhibits (including two of our own).
We’ve just begun work on our most ambitious installation to date: a 7′ round, high-resoultion, multitouch wall. The exhibit is being built for a major North American aquarium and it will be installed in early summer 2011. We are building out a rig to hold two short-throw HD projectors and four cameras. A powerful custom-built PC will be used for tracking and powering the projectors.
Here are some photos of us getting started. Paul Lacey, Chris Steinmetz and I will post updates as we continue to build out the exhibit over the next few months.
The seven foot ring being placed in Ideum’s Studio. (More on Flickr)
A huge aluminum case (25.24″ x 8.66″ x 24.92) is needed to house the EVGA Classified EATX System board.
Here are the rest of the specs for the system:
Intel Core i7 Extreme Edition 975 3.33 GHz
nVidia Quadro FX 5800 4GB GDDR3
12GB Corsair Dominator DDR3
2x 300GB 10,000 RPM WD Velociraptor Hard Disk Drives (RAID 1)
920Watt Enermax 85+ Power Supply
3 PCIE Firewire Cards (cameras)
Windows 7 Pro 64bit
We’ll post an update as we begin to build out the projector rig.
