Elie and I finally had some “free” time to go back to the multi-touch interface. We worked on the core library called Distal. Distal enables us to quickly put together a multi-touch GUI. It takes care of all the contact points [touchPoints], and their interaction with the GUI components [toggle button, dragable button, slider, dock, etc.]. We are also using ezGesture, which is a gesture recognition library for Processing recently released by Elie. So far, it is only used to interact with the docks containing the GUI ; one finger sliding from right to left in a specific area of the surface will make the dock appears.

Here are some visuals created using facecloth and a video showing the interaction/process.

Thierry and I had a paper published in the ACM Digital Library. We submitted the paper for the ACM Multimedia 2007, in Augsburg Germany. Our poster was a part of the “Art, Content, Applications” poster session held on the 26th of September.

The paper Performative Surface: Double Sided Interaction” is a short presentation of the interaction framework we worked on last year. This research/framework focuses on the relations that occur between co-located individuals mediated by an interface with a goal to help to emphasize the intensity of interaction by way of a two side responsive surface. We have applied this framework to two of our projects to date: Soft n’ Silky and collectiveShadow.

Elie and I met early afternoon. We turned on the computers, plugged in the cam, wired the projector and finally lit the LEDs. While working on some code (multi-touch UI) we have on ‘track’, we set a goal to produce something by the end of the afternoon. Here, sur(ta)face came to life. sur(ta)face will be the name/repository for a collection of projects/experimentations using the multi-touch interface.

sur(ta)face > faceCloth is the first project/experimentation under this label. The original faceCloth, by Elie, is an exploration of the relationship between real and virtual control. Live video is mapped onto a digital cloth, which reacts to its environment in a realistic fashion. The user selects the desired image and then manipulates the display geometry in order to create rich visual compositions. I like to say that sur(ta)face > faceCloth came in to existence to fill one of Elie’s anxieties ;-) about his “pursuit to build a decent physical controller.” (see here).

Really…. I believe that our interest here is to work with video (must it be lived or pre recorded) as a malleable material. To distort and stretch time as well as splatter and freeze ‘alive’ pixels on a surface…. A performative surface.

On theses photos and video sur(ta)face > faceCloth runs using Lost Se03 Ep18 as video texture.