As my colleagues Zeljko and Mike have already blogged about, we attended the 2009 Ubiquitous Computing Conference in Orlando, Florida. It was a very interesting gathering with some vanguard research topics. For me, the one-minute madness was a new and exciting experience. Poster authors have to present their research in a single minute. At prior conferences I observed two distinct classes of one-minute presentations: serious ones and funny ones. The purpose of the first class is obvious, while the second type tries to convince people to visit the poster stand by using some witty slides and usually an open question that would be answered at the time of visit. For this conference I decided to try my luck with the funny presentation. Here are my slides, so you can judge for yourself:

The following text accompanies the slides:

Slide2: Everyone likes to take fun vacation pictures.
Slide3: But an hour long slide show of these pictures might not be as much fun for your friends as it is for you.
Slide4: So how can you stop your friends from falling asleep? We propose a new storytelling environment which integrates 3 new technologies: GPS enabled smart phones, virtual globe applications and multitouch interaction.
Slide5: This environment could create a much more enjoyable user experience for your friends compared to a slide show. It might even be the killer app for multitouch!
Slide6: If you would like to know more about our research please come by to see our poster and hear about some much more serious applications.

Acknowledements to Hyomin Kim and Alex Vapirev for their great acting skills shown in the slides.

Here you can also see the layout of our poster. If you click on it, a larger view will appear.

Let me know if you have any comments on the presentation and poster. Thanks!

Oszkar

We have already reported on the arrival of the TouchKit as well as on its initial run. This time, we present our sturdy new mounting solution for the whole system. We have accomodated the display screen of the TouchKit in the middle of a hollow desktop. Here is the author with the solution.

It can be noticed that the TTT is tilted. This allows easier manipulation by a single user either by standing in front of the screen or sitting on a higher chair. The tilt angle is adjustable. The TTT can also lie flat which would allow easier information sharing around the table. The tabletop is mounted using hinges and a simple prop-up mechanism shown in the following image.

The table itself is a standard office desk which was customized for our needs.
Besides for running TouchKit projects, this setup can also be used for TouchKit development. The image below shows the mount of a keyboard and mouse on the tilted table, which provide a basic development environment.

Further action plans include buying and installing a short-throw projector device, which could be mounted onto the bottom of the tabletop. This would allow the screen to be lowered to a horizontal position and still have a maximum projection window size.

Let me know below, if you have any comments on the solution. Thanks,

Oszkar Palinko

After a couple of days fighting with scarce documentation, the TouchKit project, which I have written about here, is finally operational. It was tested with a helloworld and a drawing application, which came with the system. Here, you can see my colleague Mark operating the touch screen, which reacts by putting a red circle at every location where the fingers touch the display. The size of the circles depend on the amount of force exerted. Very nice!

We have also tested how the system works in dark. It seems that there is not much difference, since the TouchKit camera reacts only to infra-red light. The system appears to be fairly robust in this sense. Here, Matt is experimenting with the multi-touch display:

The installation process was a little bit bumpy, because it is described on the TouchKit web site in a concise manner. After “googling” and downloading the drivers for the firewire camera, the exemplar code had to be edited before it became functional with the hardware. The TouchKit Forum was very helpful in keeping me on the right track.

After the basic functionality of the system was proven, Mark Taipan, Matt Lape (receivers of the SURF award, and distinguished P54 undergrad students) and I figured out, that the temporary screen clamping setup and camera mount are not robust enough to operate the system easily: if any part of the system (screen, projector, camera) moves, it has to be recalibrated. Therefore we began brainstorming about possible mounting solutions. For starts, we came up with a horizontal table-top mount which would allow the system to be securely fastened. Here is Matt with the proposed TouchKit stand:

It would be useful if the table would be “tiltable” for different applications. We are working on modeling and designing such a solution. Further results will follow here, on eceblogger.

Thanks to Matt and Mark for their help!

Oszkar Palinko