benbritten.com

Hey All,

I must apologize as I have been out of the loop on NUI group happenings for a few months due to high levels of busyness. Luckily, Sandor has pointed me at some TUIO formatting discussions and I am going to try and keep BBTouch up to date with those sorts of things (i fully support expanding the TUIO protocol in a nice standard way, It sounds like tBeta is leading that charge and good on 'em.)

Anyway, from what i can gather in my 5 minutes of research (reading some NUI forum posts) is that currently some of the Quartz composer and Max plugins that NUI group helps maintain are basically advancing in TUIO protocol technology and BBTouch and some of the other 'old' trackers are not working well with them.

This is due to the fact that tBeta is using a slightly newer form of TUIO which includes the height and width of the cursor object in the data stream (ie the blob bounding box) I think this is a great addition and could use it in my own TUIO client apps straight away.

Anyhow, I am going to try and add the height and width params to the BBTouch TUIO stream (in some configurable way so that you can choose to not use them if you are using an older client) hopefully by the end of this week, busyness permitting.

That is all for now!
Cheers!
-b

many thanks to ScreamingDrills for finding a nasty little bug: Turns out when you are in the filter config window, you used to be able to put in all sorts of numbers that would break things. I added some nice constraints, but did a poor job of it :-) as of r157 you could still squeeze in a few bad numbers (ie 1 for any of the kernel sizes) so I went and fixed all that up. SO!

update your stuff to r158. (there is a new binary on the opentouch code site)

NOTE: Don't forget that BBTouch requires openCV.framework now. so be sure to grab that as well and stick it into your ~/Library/Frameworks folder. (you may have to make this folder).. It is actually a private framework, and I have been playing around with trying to get it to be part of the BBTouch codebase, but googlecode is not playing nice with it (it claims to be locked, which is possible since I got it from someone else who had compiled it. So anyway, i haven't had the time to go in and see why SVN thinks it is locked and so it is still not technically part of BBTouch, so you have to install it manually, my apologies)

But! if you do not install it, then BBTouch will brash on load. so if you re having crash on load issues, start with openCV. (BTW I uploaded the version that I am testing against to the opentouch downloads page, so you can get it there. (the link to the right that says "Fairly recent binaries").

Anyhow, I am in the process of trying to find the time to get around to thinking about updating the documentation to include the above warning about openCV as well as all the new filtery stuff. But I havent had the chance, so tell your friends.

This is a quick video (slightly better quality than the last one, altho i do manage to get in the way of the camera a few times :-) of one of the apps that i wrote for Sandor at Corporate Design Cologne. It is a combination of multi-touch coverflow (sometimes with actual covers :-) and the light box app (which I have decided is basically like the hello-world of multi-touch apps, everyone needs to write one at least once :-)

Anyhow this is all running on my prototype table which is a diffused illumination setup, the tracker is BBTouch and it is all using TUIO to communicate. The tech is all core animation using CALayers. there is lots of mipmapping going on to keep the performance up even when there are tons of images, and it works quite nicely even on my macbook pro. BBtouch never tops 50% processor and xPrexxo is similar.

Hey All,

I just commited a few more files, bringing BBTouch up to r157. I had been running 152 all week with no trouble, but Sandor managed to find a handful of bugs (of course, right when he is trying to use it at a show :-) so I made some changes and hopefully it is a bit better.

The biggest changes between 152 and 157 are that I fixed some very minor UI issues where the TUIO settings fields were not being properly disabled so you could change them out from under the OSC objects (causing some odd behavior). But the big one was that in some circumstances BBTouch would boot up and the filter settings (and the dark blobs pref) would be basically disconnected from the detector objects. no matter how much you changed them they didnt really affect anything. In any case, with 157 that is all fixed.

That is all for now :-)

I should be posting the newest BBTUIOTest.app soon, once I get it all back together.

cheers!
-b

OK, so i am dumb. changed all the cool config stuff and broke the TUIO on/off button (rendering it useless). I tested everything else last night but that d’oh!

Anyhow, r152 is up now with working TUIO again. (like, 3 lines had to change, i suck!)

here is the new binary:
bbtouchr152app