Great hardware but what about the applications? Is there an SDK? How can I develop applications for your touch table / wall? And last but not least: Does buying Intactlab/ SOCO Sensus hardware mean that I have to let Intactlab develop any custom software?
We have had a number of questions along these lines and would like to answer them one by one:
Great hardware but what about the applications?
Our system runs on a Apple Mac Mini, which on its side runs the latest, standard version of Mac OSX. Through the use of a touch to mouse driver we can normally use every mouse-driven OSX application. As an example we showed the CoolIris plugin running on Firefox in our introductory video. This feature is great for showcasing websites, presentations or application demo’s.
Is there an SDK?
There is not only one SDK, there are many.Because we work with open standards you can develop your applications in the coding language and environment of your choice. We at Intactlab use Adobe AIR 2.0 and the TUIO framework made by Johannes Luderschmidt. But you could use anything from Java to C++, from Ruby to Processing. Our software uses the TUIO protocol over UDP to output the touch-points to your application. There are a lot of open-source frameworks on various development platforms available. Let take a look at a small oversight (as taken from tuio.org):
- Unity3D: uniTUIO multitouch support for the popular game engine
- Silverlight: MIRIA a multi-touch gesture framework for MS Silverlight
- Java: MT4j an Java multi-touch development platform built upon TUIO input
- Python: PyMT multi-touch package with TUIO input
- Pure Data: fid_abs TUIO application framework
- Processing: tuioZones gesture/widget API
- Grafiti: a gesture recognition framework based on the C# TUIO API
- Cocoa: Coconuit Natural User Interface and Tangibles Framework
- TISCH: a cross-platform, cross-device multitouch development framework
- Squidy a multi-device interaction library based on TUIO
- NodeBox: TUIO library
- WPF: Multitouch Framework for Windows Presentation Foundation
- WPF: Tangibilis framework for Windows Presentation Foundation
- WPF: Breeze multi-touch framework for Windows Presentation Foundation
- MultiTouch.Framework: a native Cocoa multi-touch framework for Mac OS X
- Max/MSP: MMF multi-touch framework
For the complete picture look at http://www.tuio.org/?software .
How can I develop applications for your table/ wall?
Normally I’m not a big fan of answering a question with a question. But how do you develop your programs for mouse driven software? First you want your software to perform a certain task or assist the users in performing a certain task. Secondly you envision specific features, user interface elements and user feedback along these lines. Then you decide who is going to develop the actual application. Are you capable enough programmer or should you hire an external development team? We at Intactlab are specialized in multi-touch software development but we fully understand that we can’t produce every application which is going to run on a Touchy or TouchWall .
Choosing a development partner is very easy with our products. You can pretty much can choose who you want. Through the use of open standards the range is huge, from all the web-developers who knows there way in AS3 through all the technical hardcore developers who program C or C#. Even the core technologies from Microsoft like Microsoft Silverlight and the Windows Presentation Framework (WPF) are possible to use thanks to the open-source TUIO implementations.
Testing is key when developing for multi-touch environments. That is why Martin Kaltebrunner from the Reactivision team has come up with the handy TUIO simulator. It simulates the touch input, which is normally send from the touch-screen tracking application. Through this method applications can be tested without the actual table or wall sitting next to the developer. Next to Martin’s TUIO Simulator there are other TUIO simulators build in Adobe AIR.
Does buying Intactlab/ SOCO Sensus hardware mean that I have to let Intactlab develop any custom software?
As you can already see from the previous sections the answer is no. You don’t need to hire us to develop or optimize your multi-touch software portfolio. Because of the open standards that we support you can develop applications on a large number of development platforms. When it comes to software development in Adobe Flash or Adobe AIR I can definitely recommend our services. We have years of experience developing software for these devices starting from early 2007. We have successfully completed several custom projects and look forward to many more great collaborations in the near future.