Early tests with the multitouch table hardware

Pfffeww ! I finally completed the construction of my mini multitouch project this weekend. In total, I probably spent 5 or 6 hours actually building, the rest of the time (spread over a few weeks since the beginning august) was spent scavenging and buying materials, parts and tools. The most frustrating part was that I had access to a very limited set of power tools (basically only a drill and a dremel). I had to do everything else using a hacksaw, which sucks for cutting wood ! Hopefully my uncle let me use his table saw when I needed to cut the acrylic sheet at a 45 degrees angle. The funiest part was when I went to get my ghetto IR filter (basically an unexposed film negative). I bought a brand new film and told the clerk to develop the film right away. You should’ve seen the look on his face ?! All I wanted is to get the film processed so that the unexposed parts turn black, which by the way block visible light, but not infrared

Anyhow, now that the hardware is essentially completed. It’s probably one of the very few wooden firewire peripherals you’ll ever see I did some spray painting with the stencil I carved last week, so now it has the Creative Commons logo on the side.

Here are some pictures and a quick video I generated by some code I hacked with Processing.

Now I need to code a whole bunch of software. I’ll probably start by porting some of the code from Processing to a clean Java project. Then I’ll somehow need to hack some code for fixing that heavy barrel distortion caused by the use of a 1.9mm fisheye lens.

I’ll keep you guys updated.

“… all the pieces of the pie and the venti latté”

I was just listening to Macbreak’s discussion about Steve Jobs’ latest keynote that unveiled the new iPod touch, iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store etc… They pointed out that now Apple really has a fully vertically integrated market reaching out to a wide audience. That is going from production (with Final Cut Pro, Logic and GarageBand) to the iPod touch, iPod nano (that all support video podcasts covering many price brackets) through the iTune Wi-Fi Music Store and even on-the-spot impulse buying at Starbucks (that is “location-based multimedia content retail”).

They, jokingly, referred to it as “Now Apple has all the pieces of the pie and the venti latté.”