Actually, the most difficult thing to do is make it work well in the
real world. Making it work isn't too difficult, there are lots of
working variations, including the Pd-powered reacTable. But video
tracking is really limited. You have to have completely steady
lighting conditions (notice the lights were turned off in that demo).
I used that exact table interface at NIME at IRCAM. It is certainly
nifty, but it needs work to work in the real world. The problem with
video tracking is that there is no way to to track your finger,
instead it just tracks shadows. What happens is if the video
tracking looses track of your finger for one instant, then it thinks
you picked up your finger and put it back on the table. That can
definitely screw up your actions. And unfortunately which ever video
tracking system thing I have seen, that exact thing happens quite
frequently.
Then there are multitouch sensors, which probably more reliably track
your finger, but they are quite slow, so they work fine for moving
sliders and pressing buttons, but for drawing or musical control,
they are quite limited.
I think that using pressure sensors will probably be the better way,
over video tracking, but don't hold your breath either way. Plus,
more importantly, I haven't seen any killer apps for this yet, that's
key. Sure, its nifty to wiggle images around and zoom and navigate,
but that's a really simple app. Try making photoshop with that,
where the interface "just disappears" I don't think humans could
remember enough gestures to map all the functions in Photoshop, so a
menu would probably be necessary.
If you want to see a real killer demo, check out the 1968 demo of
Doug Engelbart's Augmentation Research Center. That's a real demo.
They basically showed up when many people were still using
punchcards, and interactive computing was just beginning to take
hold. They should a actual, functional system with hyperlinks, a
basic GUI, the mouse, video conferencing, custom computer furniture,
etc. when most people were excited to be using the terminal:
http://sloan.stanford.edu/mousesite/1968Demo.html
I guess I am just sick of the amount of hype these days. All these
"media labs" put so much energy into hype, instead of making better
things.
There, that's my rant.
.hc
On Nov 8, 2006, at 1:02 PM, Kyle Klipowicz wrote:
I think that the most difficult (and useful) thing to do would be
some sort of book keeping to track individual fingers. Maybe some
sort of gloves or fingertip sensors? That would make things very
flexible.It sounds neat that you're doing an implementation. Please post
any satisfying results to the list!~Kyle
On 11/8/06, Thomas Grill gr@grrrr.org wrote:
Am 08.11.2006 um 05:46 schrieb Kyle Klipowicz:
I KNEW this had to have something to do with Jeff Han. Brilliant
technology. As I understand it, Apple Computer has gotten
involved financially with this. I'd love to see it implemented!Actually this is fairly easy to implement. There are a number of
descriptions floating around in the net. Basically you need a transparent acrylic panel, IR emitters, a
beamer and a fast camera, minor drilling and assembling skills and
a multi-blob video tracker. I'm currently trying to build such a system.greetings, Thomas
-- Thomas Grill http://grrrr.org
--
http://theradioproject.com http://perhapsidid.blogspot.com
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