aberant space

first look at my multi-touch table

i’ve finally got some pics together of the prototype i’m building for a reactable type multi touch table.  Since this is a diffused rear illumination style table, i needed some source of IR light.  This one is a partially finished IR light that will have up to 40 IR leds.  The power comes from an old 300w computer power supply i had around. 

I realized that the particular leds i got needed to be trimmed on the side so they would be able to sit flat against the board together.

Here’s the table frame i built.  I left the frame pretty sparse because i tried to make few assumptions about what i needed.  It couldn’t hurt to be a little more stable, but until i figure out how everything will fit, it’s just fine.  the camera is on a cardboard box hidden partially by the frame.

tuio-ruby in google summer of code!

Anirudh Sharma is hard at work extending Google Sketchup with tuio-ruby to create a multi-touch modeling environment.  ( Check out his proposal for more details ). 

His blog has been documenting his progress so far, and he’s also got a video up a multi-touch project ( sparsh ) he was a part of.

ruby TUIO client useage

i was snooping around the inter-tubes and found a blog post about using my tuio client.  since i use Processing for any graphical front ends, i use jruby to run my hybird java/ruby TUIO projects.   since, the JVM uses native threads instead of “green” threads like c-ruby, there isn’t any waiting on other threads to execute nonsense.  i would think that something similar to thread starvation would be a particularly pesky problem if you integrated with c/c++ libs that had ruby extensions.

in other news, i’m working up a thin jruby wrapper for Processing to give an example of how to integrate audio, midi, and the tuio libraries into a singe processing project.