We are Announcing Sparsh UI, an open source multi-touch API that works across devices and
platforms.

The Multi-Touch Lab at Iowa State University has released the open-source codebase Sparsh UI (v1.0b), which allows easy development of multi-touch
applications that work across devices (e.g. FTIR touch table, Stantum, IR bezels, cardboard box touch devices) and across platforms (Java, C++; Mac,
Windows, Linux).

Here is what Sparsh UI offers!
– Includes gestures (don’t need to program them),
– Includes a Multi-touch Simulator so you can develop apps without the multi-touch device connected (Windows only for now)
– Does not depend on hardware(An adapter for TouchLib enabled devices is provided alongwith)

Coming soon:
—Support for UserIDs for collaboration on the same multi-touch device [to identify different users on the same device]
—Support for Static Gestures.

Download and try it out at http://code.google.com/p/sparsh-ui/
Find documentation on our wiki and sample applications on our home page, discuss it on our
Google Group [ http://groups.google.com/group/sparsh-ui

Feel free to contact us for any questions!

–The Sparsh UI Team
Virtual Reality Applications Center
Iowa State University

I have heard about the new beta but have been too busy to even download it :-( That said, do you know what libs they are using to access the firewire stream in tbeta? I know it is a cross-platform solution so I wonder if they are using one of the POSIX 1394 libs or if they are checking for the architecture and then running some hardware specific code?

Anyhow, I have a fire-i cam, the same as many many NUIGroupers, so I am sure that if that didn’t work you would have heard about it by now :-)

In any case, the sequence grabber code that I am using is all in one object: CSGCamera, (which I actually got originally from another open source project, and updated it for BBTouch).. so have a look in there for the specifics of how I am handling the camera input stream. (ie, I am letting the system deal with it :-)

none of that is probably helpful :-) hopefully soon i will have a few free minutes to download the tbeta stuff :-)

Cheers!
-b

As you probably know nuigroup has released tbeta, Cerupcat has been having issues getting the firefly mv to work with tbeta on os x and on windows.

As it works seemlesly with bbtouch i wondered if you might be able to shed some light on it?

Do you have a firewire cam and if so does it work with tbeta?

Any way just thought id ask!

Cheers and keep of that redbull!

Thanks that sorted it out, now works perfectly.

Cheers

The software doesn’t care what rez you are running your projector at, but it is important to configuer your mesh at the right resolution.

So: when you are configuring your mesh, make sure your projector is in 1280×720 (or whatever rez you want to work at). then do the mesh config stuff (ie project the white mesh full screen, then drag all your camera mesh points so they match).

Then check with the test view, and if the blobs line up you should be good to go.

(with a few caveats: some of the more complicated flash apps use the touchlib config files to calibrate themselves. BBTouch has a similar thing, but it is a totally different file, so you would need to rewrite that part of the code in the flash app.)

Also note: the TUIO information that BBTouch is generating presumes that the TUIO client app is running fullscreen, so if you aren’t running fullscreen you will need to account for that (ie convert the fullscreen TUIO coordinates to your current window)

Quick question: which flash apps are you using?

Also: about the screen going white: Yeah, that is a known issue. If you ‘Go Fullscreen’ on a view while another view is already fullcsreen, there is no way to get it back, and strangeness can occur :-)

Cheers!
-b

thank you very much for coding this piece of really cool software!
I chose this one for my table, because i think the blob-detection is better than other available.
But, for which resolution ist the software optimized? My blobs detected and shown at BBTouch are OK, when sent to an Flash-Application, there is a offset of ca. 5cm(ca. 2inches). My HDMI-beamer shows native 1280×720, i switched already to 1024×768, but there seems to be no better result. Do you´ve a tip for this effect?
One hint: There are a few error, when changing the views around, then the screen is only white.

it looks like it is not starting up the sequence grabber properly when you load BBTouch (that is the SGSetchannel error) and then it looks like about 15 seconds later, you hit the settings button and it fails ungracefully because there is no channel to set the settings on. (I really should add a check for that eh? :-) So the problem is that for some reason BBTouch does not get the cam on first try like it should be.

try this: in your Application Support folder/BBTouch/ trash the cam settings file. (be sure BBTouch is not running at the time) there may be something off in there.

After that, go ahead and reboot your whole system. very occasionally when I have trouble like that with the camera, i can never get it to come back without a reboot.

first thing after reboot: try BBTouch. (ie make sure that you dont have any other apps open that could possibly be trying to use the camera)

if that doesn’t work, let me know and I will have a closer look into the code. There is something definitely going on in the sequence grabber code. One problem is that much of that code has been deprecated by Apple, but the equivalent functionality has not been exposed in the QTKit, so right now it is sorta in this limbo where it all ’should’ work, but there are a few really crazy bugs that pop up very occasionally. (making them very hard to track down :-) but there is no alternative yet.

Cheers!
-b

I hope you’ve been keeping off the red bull!!! I have a nice crashy problem that i hope you can fix!

No matter what i do i cant get BBtouch 158 not to crash when i press the Cam settings Button. It doesn’t matter which camera or variations of camera i plug in it just crashes.

Ive tried trashing the preferences both the com.BB.BBTouch.plist and the com.yourcompany.BBTouch.plist but this has no effect.

Heres the console:
19/10/2008 22:17:14 BBTouch[894] SGSetChannelUsage() returned -32767
19/10/2008 22:17:31 com.apple.launchd[111] ([0x0-0xb80b8].com.BB.BBTouch[894]) Exited abnormally: Floating point exception

Any help would be very gratefully received. I have probably not done something V simple! You know, like not switching it on and off again!!!

Cheers.

thanks for the kind words :-) There have been a few requests for this over at NUIGroup, and initially i said ‘no’, but I have thought about it some more and I think it is absolutely do-able, it is just a matter of deciding how to go about it.

Currently the TUIO spec does not include the ability to send radius, but I think that the reactivision guys are working on a new updated spec, so I will go and have a look at that. If that is not a solution, it is trivial to add a radius command to the TUIO data stream (the other TUIO clients should ignore it). So that is also a possible solution.

Anyhow, I will do a bit more research and see what I can do.

Cheers!
-b

Amazing piece of software you developed! Simple, effective and… for the Mac!

Been messing around with BBTouch and Processing for a few days, got everything working fine but was wondering if it’s possible to send blob radius (such as the info in the test view) over TUIO. Is this information extracted with the blob detection or is it infered by some other method?

Thanks a lot, will keep you posted on the advances of my little project!

Keep up the good work,
Pedro.