Monday, June 2nd, 2008...10:02 pm - Catherine Gleeson
Multi-touch Open Source dev kits!
It would seem that multi-touch interfaces are the new black. In any case - they’re really really popular. They’re popping up like mushrooms all over the place with companies like Microsoft and Apple in a mad race to get devices/concepts to market. Ken Han introduced the genius of his multi-touch interfaces to a rapt crowd at TED in 2006. Smaller enterprises such as Italy’s IO are having an excellent time mapping interfaces on any surface which springs to mind. The reason for multi-touch popularity may be that it’s an incredibly intuitive way to build an interface and a really satisfying, nay joyful (fancy that), experience for the user/audience/content creator. I can attest to this experience now that I am the proud owner of an iPhone. Quite often I find myself playing with the interface without performing any function whatsoever - how often do you find yourself doing that on your average mobile device?
But what if your dream is to prototype a multi-touch project but you don’t have the resources to start from scratch? I stumbled across TouchKit when I was checking out a story on a giant ceiling clock and suddenly found myself getting reacquainted with the work of eyebeam and a whole slew of folk out there experimenting at a grass roots level.
Eyebeam is a creativity incubator offering “state-of-the-art tools for digital research and experimentation…where artists and technologists actively engage with culture”. Eyebeam supports and offers open source projects from its own project (Atelier) workshops. One of Eyebeam’s “Atelier” projects is is a modular multitouch development kit called Touchkit developed by New York based studio NOR_/D. Touchkit aims to make multitouch source code readily available as open source and is a sister project of the CUBIT multitouch system, aimed at implementing rapid development of multitouch projects. It uses eyebeam’s openFrameworks, a soon-to-be-released C++ library for creative coding which underpins the whole shebang.
Further to eyebeam I discovered a story about a 17 year old boy in the US who has managed to create the first OSX multi-touch table, made possible in part at least by an open source project called OpenTouch which grew out of Google’s summer of Code. Good to see organisations facilitating the development of creative technology at a grass roots level. Even more interesting to see what really fires developers and designers up. There’s a growing passion for “natural interaction” - a dissolution between human interaction and the machine. If you want to get a quick review of some current multi-touch projects in development - hop over to the Natural Users Interface group (NUI) for a quick RE-view.
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