future instruments new multitouch surface ...

[sonolive]

hi guys,

here is a website of a friend of us, from geneva's university,
They are developping a new multitouch system for any surface

have a look here

http://www.future-instruments.com/

They also look for a name for their system ... you can give your opinion here :

http://www.future-instruments.com/name_survey.html

cheers
olive

[dawman]

The Transporter Room From Star Trek................

Wow the monome thing is really taking over.
Another European trend is taking root......excellent.

Thanks Olive..

[braincell]

I was thinking about the Tenori-on yesterday because Yamaha is distributing an ad for it in the Cubase 5 box. There are some good videos of it on Youtube. I noticed that people usually use one finger so why can't someone just make a virtual copy of it? Use the mouse. This would be a good project for a computer engineer.

[Neutron]

you need 2 fingers to set the length of sequences and some other things. i suppose you could click and then right click on the next LED.
there is a tenori on type thing for the iphone/touch as well

that controller is very cool but 10MS response time is kind of slow. i guess that can only improve though.
i wonder how much the "special camera" is, of course they couldn't make it use an off the shelf cheap camera

[Neutron]

lol Im just waiting for some open source version that uses a web cam and $10 home depot laser levels

[kensuguro]

You gotta admit.. people just "want" to multitouch. And that "want" will make it happen. People "want" to believe that it is the way of the future, because it appears so. I still think touch interfaces are just novel. Kind of in the same way HMD's still haven't made it to mainstream even though it's more affordable now, and it makes logical sense to use one.

But you never know eh, like I've said before. Japanese WANT a humanoid robot. Not that they need one. But they WANT one, and will probably build one whether people think it's a good idea or not.

I can see all these sort of things going in a similar direction. It's like the music table stuff. Be it RFID, camera based pattern tracking with ARtoolkit, infrared based blob tracking.. people will make installations and demos saying it's the way of the music future, exactly like how other have said it for the past 20 years. It's usually some sort of 16 step sequencer that triggers loops, or one shot samples. If it's not that, it's a proximity based mixing device, where each graphical entity represents a sound, and their spatial location, orientation is used to determine sound attributes. (volume, filter) Whatever it is, it's never a serious musical tool because if it's too serious, the developers can't demo it to the general public, and also can't get grants.

Oh but wait, the graphical entities are stuffed into a physics engine, and so you can throw them around. Watch as they trigger events when they bounce off each other and walls. With internet connection, you can even collaborate with people anywhere in the world! Yeah yeah, I tend to get a little bored after the 10th regurgitation..

As an add on use, the inteface can even tell you how to put together furniture! lol. Putting together furniture has been an eternal theme for interfaces.. for some reason.

[siriusbliss]

a yes the laser

frikin' 'lasers' - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bh7bYNAHXxw

Greg

p.s. lasers cause too much latency. Infrared is better.
IMO - this particular development is a little overkill technology-wise - even though it's cool (I guess).

[next to nothing]

less advanced and much much cheaper alternative:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5s5EvhHy7eQ

[next to nothing]

http://www.aboutprojectors.com/3M-MPro1 ... ector.html

If you want you can bring it just for calibration, then remove it and use any markings you'd want, be it tape, pen or whatever. kind of a neat trick

[kensuguro]

btw, there's now a flash port of the ARtoolkit which was (and is, to a degree) all the rave in the interactive world about 10 years ago.
http://www.libspark.org/wiki/saqoosha/FLARToolKit/en

do a search, you'll find a bunch of demo videos. And yes, people built a bunch of 16 step sequencer/samplers from this too. Not yet with the flash one, but certainly with the original C version.

[braincell]

you need 2 fingers to set the length of sequences and some other things.

Hold down the left mouse button, drag and release.

Is this a great new interface or is it a toy so you can show off to your friends? There is no reason on earth this can't be done better with just software and a standard computer. The Tenori-on isn't going to make it at a thousand bucks.

[kensuguro]

Hold down the left mouse button, drag and release.

What are you talking about... "drag and drop" won't get you grants, and certainly not a master's degree or a phd. You have to choose from these technologies: motion delta tracking, motion delta and blob tracking, ir blob tracking.... actually, with camera based multitouch, it's always going to come down to blob tracking. You just need one of those 60fps cams to do the tracking with. Do they have 120fps ones now?

Is this a great new interface or is it a toy so you can show off to your friends?

This "new" interface is a vehicle to get grants. Foundations, government, etc give funding to school, and the school allocates grants to projects. The school will give out grants to projects that have a higher chance of being distributed to many different symposiums and conventions. ("hits records") If your sales pitch is bad, you won't get the grant. If you're not good at pr, you need to hire someone to write one for you. Your pitch needs to be aware of market trends, so that you can present in many places, and as a result, gives the school more presence in academia. When your project succeeds, and gets patent, or becomes incorporated, etc, usually you sign a contract that hands a percentage of the rights of the invention / finding to the school because you did it with their grant. For my school, it was 50% of all rights. The school needs to allocate grants to projects with good pr visibility or else... you guessed it, the foundations and government organizations are less likely to give them funding for next year.

Usually, with these units, the there are lots of logistical hurdles to convert to a production ready prototype.
1. Camera, lasers / ir spots are usually consumer products, so it's hard for a school to reach the manufacturers to purchase parts. (for production)
2. Software usually runs on a computer. It's usually not readily embeddable, and so the transition to embeddable form becomes a huge hurdle. It also requires an entirely different skill set.
3. Funding is tough to get, because the demo unit is not embedded, and is not production ready. (catch 22 situation) You can present the product as a pc/osx based system where "anyone can build the system" IF they can get a high res, high frame rate cam that does IR or whatever laser / spot you use. That turns off investors and presents compatibility issues. You can present it as "we already have the software, we just need to make it embeddable". Which is a major turn off because that means a custom circuitboard has to be built form scratch, code rewritten for the board... too much work. basically, it's R&D from ground zero.

basically, what many people fail to realize is that writing software, and building an embedded system is quite different. Writing software in c, doesn't mean you'll be able to compile it into a hardware box that does the same thing. That misunderstanding usually kills it.

[braincell]

We already have perfectly good hardware.

Being able to use any service with decreased resolution, increased latency and a high price is not an advantage. You are right, this project is about getting grants. It has nothing to do with the real world and it's not going to amount to a hill of beans in the end. They should focus on software not hardware because hardware has by far outpaced software in the commercial market; plus it doesn't take a huge investment to make software, just a lot of time, hard work and creativity.

[Gordon Gekko]

hardware has by far outpaced software in the commercial market

would you care to expand a little? I don't get what you are saying

[kensuguro]

In terms of getting new stuff out there, what braincell says is very true. Hardware usually outpaces software because when electric engineer students make things, it's usually embedded and much easy to convert to production compared to a software that runs on a pc/mac.

But anyway, I think I should clarify that my sourness is directed at rotten parts of the system. I think it's very important to experiment and try new things. Even if it's reinventing the wheel. One idea implemented by 40 different projects at different time period still pushes us forward. It's just that there are so many projects that exist because a paper is easy to write (tons of prior research), or because it's a "hot" item at the conferences. All that stuff seems a little distant from academics. So, sorry for sounding like I'm bashing on this project in particular. I do wish them good luck and hopefully end up with a product that makes multitouch accessible for more people.

[Gordon Gekko]

huh, could you define "stuff" then?

[braincell]

Just to use the example where they used mallets to play; there is no velocity! It would be a poor substitute for my 30 year old Drumkat. Control over velocity is one of the most fundamental, basic and important features of any electronic instrument. They are not thinking like musicians.

[Neutron]

a yes the laser

frikin' 'lasers' - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bh7bYNAHXxw

Greg

p.s. lasers cause too much latency. Infrared is better.
IMO - this particular development is a little overkill technology-wise - even though it's cool (I guess).

laser is light. nothing is faster than light.
thats why they use it for fiber optics communications and other super fast things.

[kensuguro]

huh, could you define "stuff" then?

"stuff" as in new instruments / control surfaces, basically any product that roots from a student project. There are many successful ones, but many of them are already embedded and fairly production ready, as opposed to software solutions that needed a pc/osx to function.

[valis]

laser is light. nothing is faster than light.
thats why they use it for fiber optics communications and other super fast things.

Seems to me that what makes fiber optics superior in communications is its ability to reject noise & multiplex many different streams of data into a single light signal. The use in electronic mediums is also subject to the methods of converting the light signal back to something usable in the electrical realm (which is why we don't have fiber optic interconnects on our computer's motherboard yet). Methods of converting a laser into a usable musical signal might be subject to some latency based on the implementation, but I'm not sure what tool(s) siriusbliss was thinking of in his response.