I am in the middle of constructing a FTIR table and I am going with the laser approach after less than satisfactory results using Infra Red LED’s. It’s going well and I have had some success with Fiducial tracking using my infra red modded webcam cam, plexiglass and such. I had been building the apps in Quartz Composer but I am not too familiar with Quartz yet.
Until my lasers arrive I decided to try and get some output from my iPhone, after all it’s a great touch screen and a change from building apps in Flash, which I know better. How do you get Camera or iPhone touch data out over the network to your MacBook and then have Flash read it??? Long story. If you are interested in going down this rabbit hole, check out these links:
- http://reactivision.sourceforge.net/
- http://www.tuio.org/?software
- Georg Kaindl’s UDP Flash Bridge video
- http://bubblebird.at/tuioflash/
- http://pixelverse.org/iphone/oscemote/
- And for lasers: http://aixiz.globat.com/
As I recently discovered, there are a few different methods of tracking and a bunch of lib’s on google code for such things. After trying most of them and trying a couple of different table designs, I decided to go with UDP-Flashlc Bridge for UDP speed and TULO-AS3 for TUIO or Blob tracking in Flash and OSCemote to track iPhone touches.
I find that sending the data over UDP using udp-flashlc-bridge is way faster and more efficient than XML- or TCP-based approaches. There is virtually no lag at all.
I modded my sea creature to work with a simple touch setup. Here is a crappy movie for now. I will do some nicer movies when I finish my table.
The next thing was to get some multi touch functionality. This one took some head scratching and it still needs refinement. I started thinking about moving photos around, rotating, scaling and such. I realized I needed special movieClip class I had created for my last big Flash project. A movieClip class can be assigned a dynamic registration point and it’s globalToLocal coords work no matter how deeply nested it lives. This allows for the first finger touch to be set as the registration point for the photo and the next touch to be used as the operator for scaling and rotating. Here is another crappy movie.
