use all your fingers
multi-touch!

Heard about those home-made multi-touch screens using infrared LEDs? We did it

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magnet v0

I fin­ished the first pro­to­type imple­men­ta­tion of mag­net, a generic tool to visu­al­ize coherences/similarities between eni­ties of any data set.

» user test & more info »

sign selector

While test­ing some ideas for a juke­box appli­ca­tion for my “media cen­ter” com­puter, I came to a point, where the user should be able to select an inter­pret or song from a huge list. If he knew the exact name, scrolling through a sorted list should be ok, but still a way to nar­row the list by typ­ing some ini­tial let­ters would be much faster and con­vinient. This should not be dif­fi­cult on a thouch screen, but as I also wanted  this appli­ca­tion to work on mouse-only devices, as a key­board was for exam­ple too space con­sum­ing in my con­fig­u­ra­tion. So I ended up try­ing to find an inter­face com­po­nent, allow­ing an user to enter a view let­ters with a point­ing device like a mouse or a track ball.

It is basi­cally a pop-out tech­nique, but mak­ing use of mov­ing the mouse pointer in two dimen­sions, than the com­mon lin­ear approach. Oper­ati­ing this first pro­to­type ver­sion on the left is still a lit­tle rough though.

Aquaris — three teams, two payers each, custom-built game controller

Aquaris is a game ded­i­cated to teach and inform about renew­able energy tech­nolo­gies and energy-saving mea­sures to chil­dren of the fourth grade. Aquaris was intended to be set up in a small museum,owned by an elec­tric­ity pro­duc­ing com­pany. Pri­vate guided tours about the topic men­tioned before where offered for whole fourth grade classes at once.
For those rea­sons, three require­ments were defined:

facts

• easy to learn game flow, due to min­i­mal com­plex­ity of gameplay
• easy to use, cus­tom made controller
• a whole class of up to 30 chil­dren can play within one hour
• chil­dren learn in a play­ful way as knowl­edge pays off in our game
• to cope with minor read­ing prob­lems, mostly audio is used instead of text

advan­tages of the con­troller built at a glance

click to see a 3D ani­ma­tion about place­ment and func­tion of the controllers

• form fol­lows func­tion: the cur­sor on the screen fol­lows one to one the con­troller handle
• no but­ton func­tions need to be learned, all inter­ac­tions nec­es­sary to play the game can be per­formed mov­ing the handle
• each con­troller device is placed accord­ingly to its cur­sor on the screen
• very pre­cise
• only needs to be cal­i­brated once at setup time
• no influ­ences of environment

Or click here to see a low qual­ity (1mb) 3D ani­ma­tion version.

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