Multi-touch Flash (Think Microsoft Surface with Actionscript 3)
This is so freaking awesome (more video goodness here). It’s the end result of an Interaction Design project by Tim Roth who built a multitouch computer by himself and then built applications for it using Flash. According to Mike Potter, it’s been rolled into a platform being built by Natural User Interface. According to Mike the software, built on ActionScript 3, is going to be open source so anyone building their own multitouch hardware can use it.
In doing some digging I think it’s the same group that does Touchlib (and I think Touchlib is what’s running the machine in the video. Touchlib is a multi-touch development kit which supports Flash via the TUIO protocol. I’ve heard rumors that Microsoft Surface‘s original demo were all based on Flash and so they may have been using Touchlib.
Mike points out that this has serious implications for mobile devices. Multi-touch stuff is really cool and having an open source development environment that lets you build multi-touch applications is going to be a great thing for the community. The hardware is just going to get cheaper, so the barrier to entry should be lower and lower as time goes by. These guys are coming to MAX (and brining the table) so make sure to swing by!
[tags]Flash, multi-touch, Microsoft Surface[/tags]
Posted in Adobe, Flash, Rich Internet Applications
September 20th, 2007 at 11:10 am
Ryan,
Great find. From what I can tell there is a noticeable delay in the movement/touch -> UI rendering the content. I think getting this down to a more acceptable delay will do wonders for multi-touch. Playing with other multi-touch interfaces this lag is the most frustrating part. So far most of the interfaces I’ve played with have been Alpha type code like what we see above. Once the final interaction/use case is baked and the code optimized the interactions will most likely be much more acceptable.
Great to see everyone competing/leapfrogging each other in this space.
Kurt
September 20th, 2007 at 12:40 pm
Like Surface (and even the iPhone though it really works there)… my arms are tired just watching. Seriously, I don’t see a ton of improvement over, say, a track ball or mouse. I something where it tracks my eye and I can blink to click or something.
I think it’s cool… looks impressive etc. But, I really don’t see what this offers over existing technology.
September 20th, 2007 at 10:11 pm
Sweet! Multi touch is really exiting at the moment!
Btw: The Microsoft Surface demos was done in WPF.
September 21st, 2007 at 12:02 pm
I think having the multi touch function on mobile devices will definately propel the mobile web into the future. No more fiddling about with those tiny keys trying to navigate. Touch function on mobile phones could be just what the mobile needs to truly explode.
September 23rd, 2007 at 1:43 am
hey thanks for linking my project…
Just a few notes on the comments. Yeah, there is definitley a lag, this has to do with a number of things. The hardware was not optimal, and runs a lot better now. The TUIO Class got about 30-50% faster in the meantime, a lot of things have been optimized. It was really a matter of time, a month more on the project and it would have been a lot better, but hey deadline is a deadline:)
I should maje a new video as a comparison, but now I´m focussing more on the hardware side..