Emulating multi-touch using two tablets

Kaj Grönholm's post about multi-touch motivated me to implement my previous idea of using two tablets to emulate multi-touch input (which should allow for 2 "real" multi-touch cursors). So, I quickly hacked together a modified version of the SimpleSimulator from TUIO_CPP and loaded it on a N800 and a N810. The result works quite well: (link to the video)

Again, the multitouch version of NumptyPhysics uses two cursors for dragging and three cursors for deleting, which works nicely on a multitouch table. Oh, and if you crank up the volume on that video, you will hear the sounds that we have added to NumptyPhysics recently in order to give some audible feedback about the user actions. Stay tuned for more in a few days.

Multiplayer NumptyPhysics (on a MT table)

(Again, not really tablet-related, but multiplayer could be ported to tablets eventually. Feel free to skip :)

The multi-touch table version of Tim Edmonds' NumptyPhysics gained support for multi-player modes and multi-touch drawing, dragging and deleting in the last few weeks. You can watch the evaluation video here or below.

New features and play modes include:

• Multi-player cooperative (single token and goal)
• Multi-token single-goal versus game
• Multi-token multi-goal versus game
• Draw multiple strokes at the same time
• Move drawn items with two-finger-drag
• Delete drawn items with three-finger-tap

Lesson learned: You need to get the level design right.

Word count for "multi" in this post: 10.

NumptyPhysics on a multi-touch table

(Not really tablet-related, but related to NumptyPhysics, which has been initially written for the tablets. Feel free to skip :)

The summer semester is in full swing, and we have been working on our HCI multi-touch seminar work for the last few weeks. We plan on extending Tim Edmonds' NumptyPhysics to work on multi-touch tables and adopt the UI accordingly to take advantage of multiple input cursors. We did a trial run on a real table last week:

The cude currently only emulates mouse events, but will allow real multi-touch input soon. We will release the code as soon as some bugs have been fixed and the code design got a bit more stable.