something in the way

SenseWall (preliminary) from Tiago Serra on Vimeo.

Multi-touch walls have been a closely-guarded novelty, but they’re evolving into something else: a real, usable platform that focuses on content and not just gimmicks. In the process, a hard-working community is building richer, standards-based, cross-platform, free and open source tools. The result: faster iteration, broader access of artists to the technology, and soon, hopefully, better and better work.

Tiago Serra writes with his latest project, based on the Community Core Vision project. He includes a call for works that I think a number of CDM readers may want to check out.

I recently developed a multitouch wall called SenseWall, located at a Computer Science and Design university in Portugal.

In terms of hardware, the display has an area of 2.8m x 1.05m and it consists of 2 XGA ultra short-throw projectors amounting to a total resolution of 2048×768. For the multitouch sensing, this is an LLP setup using 8 infrared lasers, 2 PS3 Eye cameras and a custom compiled version of the excellent CCV tracker (ccv.nuigroup.com), giving us a touch resolution of 1280×480.

This installation is an open platform for anyone interested in doing something with it. Although it is a multitouch enabled surface it also has a pair of cameras at the top for computer vision applications, a microphone for sound input, speakers for sound output and an RFID reader (http://www.touchatag.com). So there’s lots one can do with it.

By open platform I mean that our intent is to have college students use it at will, being in class courses or just for fun.
A webapp is being developed by a few students so that anyone can upload their apps through a web interface making them available instantly on the SenseWall. This will be also open sourced once finished on GoogleCode.

At the SenseWall there’s an “app launcher” showing the available applications name, author and date.

My main purpose with this installation is to let pupils learn new HCI concepts and hilight their creativity by giving them the tool to do so. Only if I had something like it when in college

I really enjoy you’re work so I’d like to invite you to submit any TUIO (http://tuio.org) based app, or any other app that uses micro/vision/rfid, you’d like to see there, and I’ll be more than happy to send you a video of it.
I do feel that it is also a great opportunity to showcase any artist/designer/coder.

The OFFF Festival, held last week in Lisbon, Portugal, has to be one of the most visually stimulating places I’ve ever been. Herds of bright-faced, young, handsome European artist boys and girls pack by the thousands into an old steel mill. In a cavernous, resonant concrete bunker, the echo of excited chatter never really stops. Instead, to be noticed, presenters have to create visual flash – visual demos here are everything. It almost seems like it shouldn’t work. I notice a few bloggers complained about sometimes-disorganized presentations, the difficulty in hearing (tough for me, and the presentations were in my native language), and the general mayhem. But somehow, it’s the experience of the thing, the fact that presenters have to singe their ideas on optic nerves, that brings it all together.

Lisbon itself is stunning, too – perhaps not the flashiest of European towns, but in its blend of layers of North African, Moorish, Catholic, Latin, it blends into something special that seems to transcend everything around you. It’s never a cliché.

Given all this optical richness and the assembled lenses of some of the best designers in the world, it’s no surprise that Flickr was just overloaded with spectacular images of faces, scenery, and creations from the conference. The conference catalog seems itself like it came from another age: Flickr is the real catalog now. (See the OFFF tag above. If you find some particular gems, please call out your favorite OFFF photographers in comments.)

Oh, yeah … uh … I also took some kinda lo-fi snapshots.(Nope, not a photographer.)

Let’s draw more: a new rallying cry?

But one of my favorite moments of the whole weekend was watching a who’s-who of digital designers pick up Sharpies and sign the back of OFFF chief curator Hector Ayuso’s laptop. This is great on a number of levels. For one, getting to deface Apple’s pure minimalist design is deeply satisfying. And there’s something terrific about overlaying a digital design object with that old standby of creation, the Sharpie marker. But mostly, it was seeing these folks draw. I hope onstage doodling could be mandatory for next year’s conference.

More photos, which as I look back at them do oddly seem to represent my own memory of what I was looking at, whether or not they’re interesting to anyone else.

Seriously, anyone who comes across especially fantastic photos or video, send them our way! I haven’t had time to dig through Vimeo and Flickr since returning, and already what I saw was, I thought, oddly beautiful even if you weren’t there. (I think some people are good enough photographers that they live in a more beautiful version of reality.)

Lastly, a montage that has been circulating on Vimeo (I know nothing about the person who created it, but it’s quite nice).

OFFF 2009 oeiras from Bart Kiggen on Vimeo.