fingers
The idea behind Fingers was to build a platform, to exchange ideas and spread inspiration by setting up a pubic touchscreen with a drawing application, where students can share thoughts or opinions and get inspired by consuming creations of others.
Finally all team members agreed, that a multi-touch screen should be the interface of choice as users can interact most naturally in terms of painting. From that point on, the team of four students has been split up, two responsible for building the device, two for the software. From my experience level, I have been choosen as member of the software group, however I managed the coordination between groups and therefore participated in design and realization of the multitouch screen as well.
The construction followed a quite similar approach than the one shown in the video below.
The input image was refined by a rendering pipeline, using the Sun Java Media Framework (JMF) and Apple Quicktime to capture images from the camera.
A screenshot of pipeline input, as captured from the camera.
A screenshot after pipeline of normalizing, sharpening and bitmapping, before bluring.
Output example on the right is not derived from input example on the left.
Screenshot of the final application.
The rendered output image was finally completed with a simple GUI (based on Java AWT and Swing), allowing users to start a new creation, to save it or throw it away. In idle state, the GUI switched to presentation mode, showing saved pictures in random order. The whole device, i.e. touch surface, video projector, camera and computer would have been mounted in a box, using a mirror at the bottom to minimize volume, and placed in the foyer of the design department. But sadly, the touch interface has not been finished until the end of the first term of my masters studies, after which I left the University of Applied Science of Augsburg to join the Okkam project in Trento, Italy.