Under The Wire

Under The Wire

Sunday, May 4, 2008

The best Do It Yourself Multi-Touch device

Probably Photo by Alex Bartmulti-touch devices are the most exciting way to give inputs to a computer. Since having a multi-touch by buying a Microsoft Surface or an Apple iPhone would be too easy we want to make our own multi-touch device. Just for fun and to see what's the future without having to spend too much.

Surfing the web I found some interesting projects. In my opinion these are the most valuable for the reason I'm going to explain in the next paragraphs.

MT Mini by Seth Sandler

Probably this is the simpler multi-touch device I've seen. You can build it with extremely cheap materials and I think that it is ideal if you don't want to spend too much time in making the device. On the other side this is only a input device, you won't have your screen directly on your MTMini.

MultiTouch Display by BlaXwan

This is a very useful page: it explains what kinds of multi-touch display you can build with some technology tips and the theory behind them. Since the prototype proposed uses Infrared instead of light it's more accurate but it requires more work to make it and it's a bit more expensive. It worths reading this link just to know a little of theory that could be useful even in other projects.

Johnny Lee's Wii remote projects

This is probably the best example of DIY multi-touch application. If you ever wanted to do something like Tom Cruise in Minority Report does you have to build this device. All you need is a Wii Remote and a projector.

Before tcid and sirus begin complaining :-) because of I haven't mentioned their beloved OSX in the whole post I tell you that Bridger is working on a Multi-Touch device for OSX. Since TouchLib is Windows-Only he had to do some work to support his OS but seems he is doing a good job. Seth and BalXwan uses TouchLib, Johnny works in C# so you have to use Windows to control one of them device.

6 Comments:

Chris

This is a neat technology, I hope Microsoft doesn't charge a lot to provide us with the technology.

Anonymous

It's a good idea, but I think I'll stick to my computer.

Anonymous

Thanks Wisher for mentioning my work in your post.
I thinkt that those are definitively revolutionary tehcnologies, they will change completely the way we actually interact with computers.
The goal will be that we will not need to adapt to computer's interfaces (mouse, keyb etc.) but the computer will adapt to our natural gestures and ways to interact.
Anyway, there are actually some improvements on DIY multitouch consisting in the use of LCDs so the entire setup is really cheaper than using video projectors.
I'm experimenting about that and you will see shortly some news on my website.
Thanks,
BlaXwan

Mario

@BlaXwan:
I'm waiting for news about the use of LCDs, sine your feed is on my RSS reader I won't miss your next posts.
Looking at the quality of your works I'm sure that the new project would be great!

Anonymous

Surely it will!
Next weekend I should complete the plexiglas case, then I will power up everything and start to work on the FTIR part trying to achieve the best multitouch experience!
Thanks!

Anonymous

Interesting post you got here. It would be great to read more concerning that theme. The only thing it would also be great to see on this blog is some pics of some devices.
Katherine Kripke
Cell phone jammer

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