~600 people came to visit us during the Design Montréal Open House on May 2 [from noon to 5 p.m.]. We showcased work produced during the past year including our interactive table prototype.

Using physical cards and fingers, visitors were able to view and manipulate selected works from our portfolios. Each card corresponded to a specific group of works. Once a card was placed on the table, visitors were able to move, zoom and rotate a variety of portfolio images and videos from a specific project.

A lot of this was done using open sources resources, such as reacTIVision for the tracking of fiducial markers attached onto the cards, as well as for multi-touch finger tracking. Here is the complete list : reacTIVision, TUIO, Flash AS3 TUIO Client, Hype framework and Udp flashlc bridge.

We already have a new version of this project up and running as an Air2.0 application allowing us to use UDPConnector, and therefore removing the Udp flashlc bridge from the pipeline. This application is also being moved to c++ using openFrameworks.

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.

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.

This is our [ Thierry Giles and myself ] first prototype in the field of multi-touch surfaces. As the well know project of Jeff Han, our interface uses the FTIR technique. Infrared light and computer vision are used to track users’ fingers motion/interaction with the surface.

Thanks to: Julien Gachadoat (v3ga), and of course Processing and its community for their tools, libraries, sketches (i.e. “Exhaust” by Ryan Alexander), code samples, advices, etc.