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DIY Multi-Touch Tabletop "Surface PC"
notthatwillsmith writes "We've all seen the nifty demos of Microsoft's Surface PC. Now Maximum PC details how you can put together your own multi-touch tabletop PC. The article shows how you can build the cabinet and combine that with a standard PC, a decent projector, about $350 worth of assorted hardware (cameras, lenses, mirrors, and screens), and a handful of free apps to build your own Surface-like PC — without giving Microsoft $10,000."
and now we are discussing it...
Here's a Coral-cached print version of the article.
Touché.
"The body may heal, but the mind is not always so resilient." -- Deus Ex: Human Revolution
You'll see a chair come flying out of the left hand side of the screen and smash the homebrewed touch PC to bits along with a whooping howler monkey sound before the video goes completely blank.
Here's a $2 version
I have been playing around on a surface for the past two months at school. At first I thought it was sweet. When the novelty wore off then I thought it was kind of lame. I had seen the fiducials but hadn't really thought about them. The table can read over 200 unique fiducials. That is cool, and can lead to much more interesting things then spinning pictures. Also, the table is visible and more importantly, operable in a well lit room. Most DIY surface projects require darkness.
Given that the system uses frustrated total internal reflection, I imagine it would be quite sensitive to grease from the fingers and any other dirt that changes the refractive index at the surface of the acrylic?
It's a nice idea though. I wonder if it could be retrofitted to a standard glass topped coffee table or desk?
So much investigation on how to multitouch the computer and so little about how to make the computer...
Ok, Ok.
didn't Johnny Lee already do this?
Damn! I meant that to be AC. Oh Well.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Given that the system uses frustrated total internal reflection, I imagine it would be quite sensitive to grease from the fingers and any other dirt that changes the refractive index at the surface of the acrylic?
From playing with a real Surface in Vegas, I think the answer is yes - it appeared to have a few dead zones where presses were not registered very well.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Reading TFA, it's not really 350$, as they already had the projector and the PC.
It's an impressive build nonetheless.
~men are from earth. women are from earth. deal with it.~
http://steike.com/dyesight/
I've seen a lot of multitouch demos and have always wanted to mess around with the applications side of it, has anyone seen any software that allows you to plug in 2 usb mice and use that as at least a 2 point "multitouch" system? Windows 7 beta seems like it might possibly have the capability to do so with some sort of "TouchVista" add on, but other than that I can't seem to find anything for Linux or XP.
Any multitouch software I have found uses complicated algorithms to process an image from a webcam to try and deduce points from a blurry low rez low fps infrared image of fingertips. It seems like the first step (to just test out apps without complex hardware) would have been to make a driver for multiple mice, but I can't find that seemingly trivial interstitial step anywhere.
"DO NOT TOUCH"
It looks like this is getting less than 80% of the multitouch navigation events correct - rotating when the user intent is to zoom, zooming in when the user intends to zoom out, things like that. I hear MS Surface has the same issues.
Mebbe in a bit. But for now, it's something that looks cool.
Really, what would happen if some innocent person posted some question that was offensive to the powers that be here on slashdot? Would it attract the moderation of astroturf accounts? Would nobody find it interesting or insightful? Or would it disappear into the -1 zone where nobody would read it? If it was funny, would people moderate it interesting instead because funny gives no karma against the detractors who subtract? We shall see.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Microsoft launched Surface, its tabletop computer system, in the UK yesterday.
People will use the touchscreen computer "the same way they have interacted with everyday items their entire lives," said Philippa Snare of Microsoft UK, "with hands and with gestures." Instead of a keyboard or mouse, the techno-table uses a 30-inch touch-sensitive screen that also reacts to objects placed on it. Photos are automatically downloaded from cameras or phones. A spilt cup of coffee causes the "I'm a PC" guy to appear on the screen and start shouting at you for ruining his shirt, and your fourth Big Mac of the day causes him to keel over with a heart attack and the system to blue-screen. Users then make an appropriate gesture.
Unlike conventional computers which only one person can use at a time, Surface is a "multi-touch" system allowing several people can use the screen at the same time. Stealing someone's data is as simple as sliding your phone onto the screen. "We've made it completely compatible with popular gadgets such as Windows Mobile and Zune."
Surface will appear in communal areas such as shops, hotels and pubs first, allowing the public to get used to the new technology and see how it responds to pints being poured over it and kebabs in the coin slot.
Surface is part of Microsoft's vision of the Digital Home. "Imagine your television, your refrigerator, your gas boiler running Windows Vista -- I mean, Windows 7. What could possibly go wrong?"
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Considering we're not even agreed on what gestures a user *should* do to zoom and resize things, there is definitely work to be done :)
However, building these digital tabletops with a few hundred dollars and a projector makes them accessible to the dozens of research groups and hundreds (or thousands) of varied hackers who might have good ideas. Gestures are chronically tricky things to make natural and detect reliably, so we're going to need both the bazaar and the cathedrals chewing on it.
Even if it works perfectly, it will not cut it.
* You have to move your hands, without resting support. Thought mouse carpal tunnel is bad? Wait for days work with this tech
* I have yet to see demo which looks, well, usefull. It looks like it is all about eye candy. They do a lot, but they do "random stuff" ... have photo pile, pick one at random, zoom, drag it to another pile at random. Impressive, but only if you don't think about what they do.
It is more like mouse gestures which have very low user penetration for reason. (Why draw glyph if you can just press button?). Or voice command. Voice reconginition was perfected, but noone wants to use it (its slow, using it looks kinda dumb, it has no added value if you do not have disability).
-- Technology for the sake of technology is as pathetic as eschewing technology because it's technology.
You have to move your hands, without resting support.
That is actually one of the advantages of FTIR over things like Microsoft Surface* or traditional touch technologies. Because FTIR winds up detecting pressure, an application can easily differentiate between a finger resting on the surface, and one pressing down. Shape sensitivity comes into play as well, since a lightly resting arm is very different from a pressing finger.
I agree that there is work to be done before applications are useful. However, I've had enough hands-on time to be convinced that the interaction style will become useful. And getting the tables cheap enough for people to hack away at was the first step. Give it five years, and I hope we'll be seeing consoles -- and appropriate single- and multi-player games -- in a table form-factor.
*: Microsoft Surface does detect a range between touch and no-touch. Unfortunately it is determined by how high you hover above the surface, so probably worsens arm strain.
Here's a $2 version
That's $2 only if you can find a web cam within the price range.
Aren't we? The iPhone & iPod Touch say we are.
In TFA they connect 8 LEDs in series directly to a 12V rail with no bias resistor(s). This is a bogus design and they should have known better.
$350 for components is right (according to what I spent). However, buying a digital projector may bite a $700+ (the cheapest kind) chunk out of your wallet. Total cost: $1,050+ (Computer not included)
A couple friends and I built a multi-touch for about $500 total (plus $50 for a computer that our campus was scrapping.) We used one of those old-fashioned overhead projectors to do our work (and to save money). Not the ideal solution, but still works!
My wife built one of these "smartboard" like projects with a wii remote and a single infrared LED as per here. Not exactly multitouch, but it works pretty well; calibrates quickly and you can write on a projected image anywhere. It uses the IR camera over bluetooth on the wii remote to track the LED "pen", and emulates a mouse for windows XP.
I'll be watching for a Linux version of the software. It would be pretty sweet to run presentations off my Linux netbook and be able to draw on a regular projected screen.
"Knowledge is the only instrument of production that is not subject to diminishing returns" -Journal of Political Econom
Aren't we? The iPhone & iPod Touch say we are.
Sort of. Because the iPhone and company are much, much smaller than a tabletop, they wind up using a very different set of gestures. The obvious example being that it's hard to do a two-handed gesture while holding a phone.
It looks like this article is implementing the system that Jeff Han made about a few years ago and famously presented at TED. I'm glad to see this DIY article out there since it is getting lots of people interested in physical hacking, but I wish it would have referenced what came before. Here's the UIST paper:
Han, J. Y. 2005. Low-cost multi-touch sensing through frustrated total internal reflection. In Proceedings of the 18th Annual ACM Symposium on User interface Software and Technology (Seattle, WA, USA, October 23 - 26, 2005). UIST '05. ACM, New York, NY, 115-118. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1095034.1095054
If a couple guys with consumer hardware managed 80%, I can't imagine that a decent team of engineers couldn't manage 100% with a custom build that clocks in at under $3000.
Actually www.nuigroup.com has been doing it for quite sometime. The website is plenty of DIY tutorials for building a multi-touch table with lots of different setups, and they have an active community too, which helps a lot.
Finally! I can now have my MCP desk from Tron!
http://johnnylee.net/projects/wii/ There are several similar projects using the Nintendo Wii controller and IR LEDs
Curious about Storage and Virtualization? Check out
Even students can build one!
I used to spend all day, every day, paring wood with a chisel. The first couple of weeks into my apprenticeship I had calluses on my hands, my arms ached, my feet were sore and my back felt like I'd been standing all day. After that I never felt sore again from a good days graft.
These days I sit at a screen all day. My back aches, shoulder hurts and the pain in my fingers never seems to go away.
These touch screen tables sound fantastic to me.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
* You have to move your hands, without resting support. Thought mouse carpal tunnel is bad? Wait for days work with this tech
</quote>
Amazing that for years secretarial pools had absolutely NO incidences of RSI or carpal tunnel, until keyboards stopped looking like typewriters and people started relying on "resting support".
There's no need for resting support - going eight hours of typing without it is no trouble if you have any modicum of wrist and arm strength.
But like all new things exercise-related, it'll hurt for a few days as muscles get used to it, and then you'll never realize you're spending more energy doing it.
Let me know when I can drive my car with a LCARS interface...
I can say [REDACTED] anytime I want!
Does it run Crysis?
Yea but the chob locks will consume most of that and then how you do fix the candyfloss problem?
The vellum + silicone idea seems to lack durability, badly. Putting the display panel beneath the acrylic is one solution. Using a sheet of matte finish Lexan polycarbonate was suggested on the nuigroup website. That seems to solve the physical durability problem, but I have an additional question.
I played a touch screen game and noticed that it was quite difficult to play because my finger couldn't slide over the surface easily. It would stick, rather than slide. I suspect the surface material of that game was acrylic. Acrylic has a coefficient of friction of 0.45. Lexan has a coefficient of friction of 0.31, which is a significant improvement. I wonder if it's still too high, though.
I suppose ideally the surface could be coated with Teflon, but the irresistible urge to use the surface as a table would mean that lots of things would end up hitting the floor, so maybe that's not ideal after all. Not to mention that it's probably inaccessible to the DIYer.
Does anybody have any ideas for a clear, finger-slick coating that could be applied to Lexan easily that would get the coefficient of friction down to less than 0.2?
Nice to see the MS shills are still hanging around - keeps them out of the cat food.