On The Tabletop - interacting with Knowledge - Stefano Baraldi's Blog

TABULA: Natural Interfaces, Touch Technologies

2011-12-23T08:47:43Z

The year 2011 has been quite busy and revolutionary.

I now own a company called TABULA, which focuses on Natural Interfaces and Touch Technologies.
Its a laboratory, where i am developing and marketing my own products:

TouchTop, a state of the art multi-touch media environment with a full ZUI (Zooming Interface) and stunning performance. [link]

TouchMyBrand, a robust solution for large projected interactive surfaces. [link]

FaçadeSignage, a novel Digital Signage solution leveraging the power of Projection Mapping. [link]

I’ll be posting from there mainly, this blog was born as a research-related scrapbook, now research and job has merged and frankly i am not so much into blogging news from the world.

So thank you for following me, i do hope you will enjoy the news and still be part of this journey.

See you at www.tabulatouch.eu

tabulaTouch has born!

2006-07-06T16:32:00Z

See you at www.tabulatouch.eu

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.

21minutes: a live interactive sketching experience.

2009-11-28T15:02:46Z

November 19-21 2009, 21 excellent speakers in front of a thousand people highligthed passages of their lives, trying to convey the essence of their research towards excellence.
The event, called 21 minutes, is an open project that will continue and develop during the years.

I have been asked to produce an interactive sketching experience using multitouch technology, that would help the speakers and the chairman Patrizio Paoletti to draw knowledge structures during the seminar. We brought a multitouch unit there, right side of the stage, and Pierpaolo Vittoria (a trained mind mapper) used my sketching application.

We had no precise plot, most of the speakers improvised or changed their mind just before the presentations, we had video output sent to the main screen.. a real live experience.
I am very satisfied with the whole event, since the contents were so high and inspiring, the audience became involved very soon with questions and a lot of social interaction during the breaks.

A lot of people came to see the technology, the “multitouch” was not much mentioned or noticed, instead the “creative, brainstorming, dynamic, shareable” modality was considered something new and unseen, and generated many ideas and connections.
Also Gilead Sher, an important Israeli negotiator and one of the first guests, appreciated the philosophy behind the application and played a lot with it.

Will playful and natural technology/design help people towards a better communication in order to understand each other?
I do hope so, and the research continues.