We recently completed a GestureWorks application for a CNN-esque multitouch newsroom application. We’re pretty psyched, as this is our first multitouch project for broadcast media.
We’re sworn to secrecy about the show, but we can say that the app will be featured on a 52″ NextWindow 2700 overlay. An inexpensive 2-point alternative to CNN’s $100,000+ touch wall, the NextWindow system, including LCD & software, cost around $5000. The custom software allows you to sort and display image and video collections, scrub video, and draw on top of images and video clips.
The show debuts in January 2011, so check back in a few months for the actual footage. In the mean time, you can watch us demo a version of the app on an HP Touchsmart 9100 in the video below:
We’ve embedded multitouch Flash applications into the GestureWorks site, making it (as far as we know) the first site to incorporate Flash multiouch! Many of the tutorial pages now feature their own multitouch examples that allow you to manipulate example objects on the page with zoom, rotate, flick and more.
If you don’t have multitouch enabled, the GestureWorks simulator still allows you to manipulate the objects using multitouch. Just shift-click to set additional touch points. The turtle above, an example SWF from our Away 3D tutorial, can be rotated in three-dimensional space by setting two static touch points using shift-click and then moving the mouse while pressing down. Try it for yourself.
We’ve recently built out individual pages for the hardware featured on the Multitouch Hardware section of the GestureWorks site. The hardware is divided into categories for easy sorting, making it easy to compare different models of multitouch all-in-ones, notebooks and tablets, displays or tables.
For each device listed, we’ve hunted down reviews, video, specifications and even press releases to provide a comprehensive overview of device strengths and weaknesses without all the legwork. We’ve also enabled comments so we can get feedback from actual users on how the hardware performs. What are you waiting for? Check out the new GestureWorks’ Supported Hardware page for yourself!
Our tutorials have been some of the most visited pages on the GestureWorks support site and and we’re looking to expand the list even further. We’d love to hear suggestions on what kinds of tutorials you’d like to see on the site. Tweet us @gestureworks or comment on this post.
Just like everyone else over the last two months, we’ve watched the continuing oil spill in Gulf of Mexico with a sense of helplessness and despair. Not only did has this unnecessary accident taken the lives of 11 people, it continues to impact millions more. From an environmental standpoint, it it is nothing short of a complete catastrophe.
To help educate the public about this unprecedented event, we’ve decided to release a free version of our multitouch-enabled Google Map and Flickr mashup application to educational organizations such as science centers and aquariums. The Google Map and Flickr mashup combines oil spill and fishing restriction data from NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association) with eyewitness photographic and video accounts from the Gulf of Mexico. You can check and and join the BP Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico Flickr group; it includes some amazing photographs of the crisis.
Here’s a video of the application in action.
The exhibit software requires a multitouch system. We are offering it for clients who have multitouch tables. We will be building a version that is optimized to work with the 3M 22″ multitouch monitor, a lower-cost system. If there is interest, we may offer a single touch version or Web version of the application later this summer. Please email us for details about this software.
The oil spill mashup application is similar to a Google Mapping and Flickr mashup exhibit that we developed for the California Science Center. In that application, we used a number of KML data overlays to show various features of the LA Basin. You can learn more about that exhibit, L.A. Zone Multitouch, Multiuser Table, on the ExhibitFiles website. That exhibit and the new Oil Spill mashup were both developed using GestureWorks multitouch software for Flash & Flex.
Finally, with reports that British Petroleum (BP) continues to try to block media coverage, we hope that this exhibit helps in some small way to better inform the public about this disaster.
The GestureWorks team from Ideum is currently at Flashbelt 2010 in Minneapolis, MN. We want to learn how you are using (or plan to use) multitouch in your projects, and to discuss our road map for true multitouch in Flash, Flex and beyond.
Come by to say hi and talk to the lead developer of GestureWorks, Chris Gerber. We’re offering GestureWorks license discounts for Flashbelt participants. We’re also showcasing our MT-50 multiouch table and new 3M multitouch screen running GestureWorks-built applications.
So far our time here at FlashBelt 2010 has been great. We’ll continue to tweet selected presentations throughout the week. Follow us @gestureworks or search #flashbelt for updates.
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.
