GestureWorks built software will be showcased in the Touch Revolution booth at CES 2012 in Las Vegas in January. GestureWorks is our own commercial multitouch authoring framework. If you’re at CES stop by the booth and check out our software and Touch Revolution’s multitouch displays.The Touch Revolution booth will be located at South 1 -20248. Last year, we showed off our multitouch Asteroids game (see below). This year we will have a new demo to show.
You can purchase GestureWorks bundled with the Touch Revolution 21.5″ TRū™ Touch Monitor in the TouchRev store.
Next Tuesday we will be release a new version of GestureWorks, our multitouch framework for ActionScript. GestureWorks 3 is an entirely new build, we started over and rebuilt it from scratch.
GestureWorks developers will have access to the most advanced multitouch authoring environment yet developed. It includes a comprehensive Gesture Visualizer, a built-in multitouch simulator, and it introduces the world’s first markup language for multitouch; Gesture ML with definitions for scores of gestures. ActionScript developers in Flash, Flash Builder, Flash Develop, and FDT can creating powerful gesture-driven apps that can be published as SWF files, exe, or AIR apps.
In a year where there has been seemingly no positive news about Adobe Flash, we think GestureWorks is great news for Flash developers. We believe that ActionScript and Flash are important and powerful tools for application development. While HTML5 has a great deal of promise, and it will likely be increasingly important in the future; it lacks the power and flexibility that ActionScript and Flash currently provide. We need to make applications now and we’re not alone.
GestureWorks 3 was major effort here at Ideum and it represents almost a year of development. GestureWorks is primarily self-funded, however, the project did receive some important help and we are very thankful to have received $100,000 from the Venture Acceleration Fund (VAF) launched by Los Alamos National Laboratory.
The software and the new website will be unveiled next Tuesday, November 29th. We’re excited, we hope you are too.
Our Open Exhibits multitouch software initiative has just completed its first year. Last year, we received funding from the National Science Foundation and we launched our full community site last November. We’ve learned a lot in year one and we are gearing up for an exciting second year.
If you haven’t been following developments on the Open Exhibits site, here’s an update:
The Heist project was announced today. Heist is an experimental project that uses Open Exhibits and GestureWorks software and is powered by Sensus server technology to enable effortless networking. It allows museum visitors to “steal” digital objects; easily placing them on their smart phones or tablets.
The system uses a captive WiFi portal to push an HTML5 app to visitors so there is no need to download an iOS or Android app. The visitor just connects to WiFi and opens their browser. We are planning a testbed with ten museums this winter. Learn more and check out a video of Heist.
Open Exhibits is on the road in October and November. There are presentations and workshops planned on both coasts and in Europe. We’ll be at Association of Science- Technology Center’s (ASTC) annual conference in Baltimore, the British Museum in London, and at The Tech Museum in San Jose. We will have one of our MT55 Platform Multitouch Tables at the British Museum if you want to check it out.
Work has begun on a new version of our most downloaded software module, the multitouch-enabled Collection Viewer. We’ve posted preliminary designs and have explained the new features that will become available in the new version.
Open Exhibits surpassed 10,000 software downloads last month and our community now has over 1,700 members. If you haven’t already done so, please join us. We are looking forward to an eventful second year.
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.
Tune Grid is a 16-step multitouch audio sequencer built with GestureWorks. It allows multiple users to create harmonic rhythms, or play sequences of notes using multitouch input. We originally conceived of the idea with our friends at the Terry Lee Wells Nevada Discovery Museum, after seeing Andre Michelle’s ToneMatrix web application.
Tune Grid now comes standard on every Ideum multitouch table. It’s a fun multi-user sound application that does a great job showing off the integrated Bose audio system found in the MT55 Pro. Below is a video showing Tune Grid in action on the MT55 Pro multitouch table. We’d love to hear your feedback.
The NASA Space Weather Viewer is now available in the Google Android Market. You can download it here. Becoming a Google Developer and posting the app to the market was very simple process.
Back in November, I shared some of the difficulties we encountered developing and publishing the iOS version of the application. (By the way, I still believe, long term Apple will have difficulties with their model, but certainly Android and the iPad alternatives have stumbled quite a bit with the Honeycomb release.) Still, in the end the iOS version has been very successful (see: Over 100K Downloads for NASA Space Weather iPhone App in March).
Below is a video we made showing the NASA Space Weather Viewer running on Samsung Galaxy tablet and Android phone. The video is also embedded in app listing the Android Market. A simple, but smart feature for previewing apps in the market.
We will let you know how the Space Weather app does in the Android Market and if we see anything like the success we’ve had in the iTunes Store.
We’ve just completed our first release of the Android version of the NASA Space Weather Media Viewer. Like the version we developed last fall for the Apple iPhone & iPod, the Space Weather Viewer for Android features near-real-time imagery from a wide variety of NASA missions, as well as video interviews with prominent scientists.
The new Android version will be available in the Google Android Market Place and on the Amazon App Store later this month.
If you’d like to get a sneak peak of this new NASA app, you can download the alpha version right here: NASASpaceViewer.apk (4.6 mb) Update: May 31: It’s now live in the Google Market Place: NASA Space Weather Viewer
The NASA Space Weather Viewer is now available in the Google Android Market. You can download it here.
It requires Android 2.2 or greater and Adobe AIR 2.6. We’ve run it with Android 3.0 “Honeycomb” and it runs great.
The app is optimized for phones or tablets and we’ve tested it on the following devices: HTC EVO, Motorola Xoom, Nexus One, Samsung Galaxy Tablet, and the Samsung Galaxy Epic. Please let us know what you think. We will be making the source code for this Android app later this summer.
Open Exhibits has just passed 4,000 software downloads! If you’re not a programmer, or you haven’t downloaded the code, yet – we thought we’d give you an idea of what you may be missing.
This video demonstrates several of the free multitouch software modules already posted on the Open Exhibits site. These modules are designed to simplify Flash and ActionScript exhibit development, and many are compatible with the Microsoft Kinect (using MT-Kinect). The source code for every module shown in the video can be downloaded today on the Open Exhibits Software page.
We demonstrated the software on the TRu Touch 21.5″ multitouch monitor from Touch Revolution and 3M M2256PW 22″ display.
Open Exhibits modules require Open Exhibits Core SDK (free for museums, non-profits, and educational use). The software modules can be used commercially with GestureWorks SDK.
We’ll continue to post videos as we release new software. If you have any comments or feedback, we’d love to hear from you.
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.
