Our commercial multitouch SDK, GestureWorks has support for over 200 gestures. To help our users better understand what’s available in the GestureWorks software package, last year we made a poster showing most of the gestures included. The PDF poster and all of the illustrations are freely available through a Creative Commons attribution license. Now, we’ve taken a step further and have put together a font family called Gesture.

This family of typefaces includes three variations of the stroke alphabet and one font of the multitouch icons or “dingbats.”  The font is free (again through a Creative Commons attribution license).  You can find the Gesture font, poster and all of the illustrations on the GestureWorks Open Source Gesture Library page.

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.

You can learn more about the table on our MT55 Pro product page.

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.

Late last month, we quietly introduced our new MT55 HD Multitouch Table.  Today our first production unit shipped with many more headed out this week and next. (US and Canada only for now.) The table is major step forward with a huge 55″ HD LED LCD display in a hardened case which is less than 3 inches thick!

The multitouch table is a fully integrated, hardened system and it includes an integrated HP computer with a three-year warranty. It has single button operation, integrated power and cooling, a UPS back-up system, controllable LED under-lighting, and even a Bose audio system. The table also comes with the GestureWorks multitouch SDK. (You can see the full specifications on our MT55 HD product page.)

Last week, we unveiled the MT55 HD at the Museums and the Web conference in Philadelphia. We are now preparing for the American Association of Museums (AAM) conference and we have designed an ad for the conference program. Here’s a sneak peak of the full-page MT55 HD advertisement:

This week we are working on a polished promotional video that will show off all the features of the MT55 HD. Right now, we have a short video of the MT55 HD in action and a few photographs on our Flickr site (see the MT55 HD Multitouch Table set). Watch for our promotional video, we’ll be posting it very soon.

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.

You can read the full-press release on the SENSUS Website.

Fast Company’s Design Blog posted an interesting infographic yesterday on the Next 25 Years in Emerging Tech. I’ve been a fan of well-constructed infographics and folks in the studio have been passing around some really interesting infographics from Good.is lately. This particular graphic was constructed by Michell Zappa and maps a number of emerging technologies.

The technologies that we were most interested in have to do with Natural User Interfaces. Under the heading NUI, the infographic lists: multitouch, gesture recognition, augmented reality, speech recognition, haptics, telepresence, and machine vision.

The contents for the graphic were researched from “hundreds of articles, magazines, and books” and the site lists a number of sources. The graphic is available as high-resolution PNG and as PDF and it released with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.

Our module for Kinect provides a simple solution for authoring gesture-based applications in Flash. Lately, we’ve been using it in conjunction with our other free Open Exhibits software modules. While the Kinect device itself doesn’t have the necessary precision for use with every module, we have successfully paired it with our gigapixel image viewer, our new VR Panoramic image viewer, and with our Google Maps module.

Our free Kinect module works with Community Core Vision (CCV) software, an open source software package for computer vision. We’ve used this software in the past with various multitouch tables and other installations. Our Kinect module is a “directshow” source filter, a virtualized webcam device that reads data from the drivers released by OpenKinect.

Here’s a video showing the Kinect module working with other Open Exhibits software.

The Kinect module and the others are all free and open on the Open Exhibits website. The Open Exhibits core software is free for students, educators, nonprofits, and museums. (Commercial users can download a free GestureWorks trial.)  Add a $150 Kinect 3D Motion Controller to our software and you have a very cheap and flexible authoring solution.

There are photographs of the Kinect and Open Exhibits modules on the OE Flickr site.

This article is cross-posted on the Open Exhibits Website.In the video, the gigapixel image of El Capitán that appeared in the example was provided by xRez Studio. The cubic VR image of Chichen Itza was taken by Ideum back in 2005 and is part of the Traditions of the Sun project.

GestureWorks multitouch software is now available for purchase bundled with Touch Revolution’s TRū™ multitouch desktop monitors. These bundles are available in the new Touch Revolution online store. You can choose between the 15, 19, and 22 inch models.

The TRū™ Touch monitors have a very cool bezel-free design and are extremely durable. The 22″ model has HD resolution. You can learn more about the monitors and the bundle in the Touch Revolution online store.

You can see a video of the 22″ TRū™ Touch Monitor in action with a multitouch version of asteroids that we developed with Touch Revolution for CES that we posted last month.