Actually, the most difficult thing to do is make it work well in the real world. Making it work isn't too difficult, there are lots of working variations, including the Pd-powered reacTable. But video tracking is really limited. You have to have completely steady lighting conditions (notice the lights were turned off in that demo). I used that exact table interface at NIME at IRCAM. It is certainly nifty, but it needs work to work in the real world. The problem with video tracking is that there is no way to to track your finger, instead it just tracks shadows. What happens is if the video tracking looses track of your finger for one instant, then it thinks you picked up your finger and put it back on the table. That can definitely screw up your actions. And unfortunately which ever video tracking system thing I have seen, that exact thing happens quite frequently. Then there are multitouch sensors, which probably more reliably track your finger, but they are quite slow, so they work fine for moving sliders and pressing buttons, but for drawing or musical control, they are quite limited. I think that using pressure sensors will probably be the better way, over video tracking, but don't hold your breath either way. Plus, more importantly, I haven't seen any killer apps for this yet, that's key. Sure, its nifty to wiggle images around and zoom and navigate, but that's a really simple app. Try making photoshop with that, where the interface "just disappears" I don't think humans could remember enough gestures to map all the functions in Photoshop, so a menu would probably be necessary. If you want to see a real killer demo, check out the 1968 demo of Doug Engelbart's Augmentation Research Center. That's a real demo. They basically showed up when many people were still using punchcards, and interactive computing was just beginning to take hold. They should a actual, functional system with hyperlinks, a basic GUI, the mouse, video conferencing, custom computer furniture, etc. when most people were excited to be using the terminal: I guess I am just sick of the amount of hype these days. All these "media labs" put so much energy into hype, instead of making better things. There, that's my rant. .hc On Nov 8, 2006, at 1:02 PM, Kyle Klipowicz wrote: I think that the most difficult (and useful) thing to do would be some sort of book keeping to track individual fingers. Maybe some sort of gloves or fingertip sensors? That would make things very flexible. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Access to computers should be unlimited and total. - the hacker ethic |
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