touchy

Thanks to those who came to the meeting yesterday, we went through and came up with content for the grant proposal. Also, we came up with a group name:

TOHI [Touch Oriented Human Interface]

We tried to make ‘touchy’ an acronym but we ended up with too much redundancy so it got shortened as above.

Next meeting Weds 11/11/09 4PM DMC Game Lab — we’ll go over the grant proposal draft, make any last edits and get it ready to submit.

Hope to see you then!

Meeting as noted in the subject, we’re going to get into the grant writing more, pin down some details and get some content written down.

here’s what milt has for the beginnings of a budget:

(most of this comes from the link http://arbi.trario.us/2008/11/02/diy-laser-multi-touch-table/ parts sourced from aixiz.com)

the known ($44 total)
for the IR lasers:

• 4 x “780nm 25mw laser modules” @ $8 per
• 4 x “89° line generator lenses that fit the laser modules” @ $3 per (this is getting pricey!

the unknown but probably cheap:

• Power supply - probably $10
• wiring/resistors - cheap or we have
• camera with IR filter - we have wiimotes, for more resolution we could slap a filter on one of the mini HD cameras.

That’s all you need for the core of the touch stuff, the rest is for a dedicated surface/enclosure:

• Acrylic touch surface @ ? any sufficiently large Acrylic slab that doesn’t bend, shouldn’t be expensive
• rear projection applique - CAN be expensive, but we can totally find a cheap way to do it. My coworker suggested sandblasting one side of a thick piece of acrylic with almond skins (?!?) instead of an applique, he has the gear to do it.
• frame/enclosure - varies depending on design, we can probably easily cheap out on this part

For installation/mobile use, things get a bit more complicated:

• mirror/prism mountings for the lasers so the light plane can be projected sufficiently close to the surface - might be pricey, might not.
• a large rear-projection screen or improvised solution with translucent plastic

To build a working demo I would be surprised if it is more than $100.

other things I think we might want to spec, so that the project can be a standalone unit:

• computer
• projector
• camera (and IR filter)

First group meeting will be tomorrow Weds Oct 28th at 4PM at the DMC (in the game lab). Planning will commence!

We want to schedule a meeting for interested parties; the Doodle poll is available here:

http://www.doodle.com/rq6tssdvtnrcshm4

Fill it out and I’ll try to find a time that works for everybody.

We want to build a touchscreen. A big, rear-projection, multi-touch display, like this (see also this).

We’re hoping to get funded through the JHU Whiting School of Engineering Student Initiatives Fund; we’re currently assembling materials and will need to submit the grant next week.

We currently have support from the Digital Media Center and the Association for Computing Machinery.

If all goes well, we’ll get the funding and then we’ll build the interface in the spring semester. Once it’s built it will be available for all kinds of cool programming projects….. Milt has an interest in working with augmented reality (among other things) and I’m particularly interested in visually reactive touchable audio interfaces.

From a more practical perspective, a lot of development is going on these days to adapt traditional software interfaces to be more usable with touchscreens. This interface will provide not only practical experience on the physical side through the building process, but also great opportunities for usability development and testing on the software end of things.

just checking it out.