[There is a more updated post about tabulaTouch]
I am pleased to announce the birth of tabulaTouch, the multi-touch sensing platform for tabletop interaction i’ve been researching from the beginning of the year at Natural Interaction.
You may notice a similarity with Jeff Han’s project that made the net go "wow" in march.
Actually, my research started in the second part of 2005 following an intuition on the FTIR principle applied in Lightable,a pure design project that had nothing to do with interaction. I was assembling the table while Han’s paper came out, you know, ideas are in the air way before we catch them.
tabulaTouch can sense multiple points of contact on surfaces of different shape and
size, where gestures can be recognized and become expressive actions.
The first case of study has beel tabulaMaps, an application for the collaborative management of digital maps that features the intuitive roto-translation approach; we are planning to integrate it with GIS products.
We are also researching interesting media-handling templates that will bring the platform in public spaces, as well as ad-hoc environments, while iO Agency is engineering the hardware.
A very special thank goes to Viviana for her help in the initial hardware-related steps, and Fabrizio for his skills in electronics.
You can check a sample video in the NIRC projects page, as well as a longer version on YouTube.