Omniverse hardware prototype

My first hardware prototype is done. After lots of hard work and many many minutes (three to be precise) the first multi-touch prototype is done. It might not land me a job at Apple Hardware design department but I've gone for function over design aproach :) Here what you need to reproduce it.

• Cardbord box belonging to a bedlamp

• Old webcam you have lying around (I stole my girlfriends)


• Tracing paper (Atleast that what I think it's called. The paper you use to bake you know?)


• Tape


• Wettowl from local pizza place (optional)

Well I won't insult you by telling you how to put it all together but remember that this will only give you dark blobs so your software need to be able to trace that (CCV does that nicely)

My first test gave me very good results as I mentioned in the last post. When I get my Playstation Eye camera I will try to make a more permanent version for my glass table so I can get some better settings and calibration.

And if you wonder about the yellow wettowl. It's a pillow for the camera cause it cant bend it's neck as I wish. And I like to be nice to my gadgets ofc.

Until next time

Ordering in some hardware

After I've been doing some early testing with a crap camera and a cardboard box to get my first blob detection done. It work very good with CCV running at about 4ms detection time and 30 FPS.

But after some more research I found that the Playstation EYE camera is a very good cheap alternative for Multi-touch tables. The Playstation EYE gives me 60fps @ 640 x 480 and 120fps @ 320x240. So it's been ordered now and I hope to give it a test run this weekend.

I just hope that my poor laptop will be able to cope with such high resolution of uncompressed images. I can hear it shaking already. hehe

Project Omniverse

Off I go,

I have given it a name and made it official. So what is it? Well, It's kind of a desktop replacement for Windows 7.

Here is my description as of now:
A desktop replacement software that is optimized for Natural User Interface (NUI) aka Multi-Touch screens. It should be able to deliver all media available in modern computers in a intuitive way without being fixed with normal Window based systems. As the name suggests it can involve all parts of physics or dimensions as it feels fit just to bring the user a natural way of working with the media.

On this project I will depart from my normal standards where I aim to make it OS independent and hardware independent. But since this is such a big undertaking it will be aimed directly to Windows 7 with Directx 10.1 or higher. I hope I can backtrack on this later but I just don't want to be fighting with API's and spend more time with UI/Hardware design.

The whole project will be open-source and the hardware drawings will be available as I make them.

This will be a learning path for me to get going with C++/DirectX, 3D Math, Electronics and of course LASERS!! :) So you will see lots of beginner mistakes, and wonder why in "insert your religions god name here"'s name he is doing that. Well, don't worry. I enjoy making mistakes cause that's the only way I remember what I've done :)

Bye for now
Kenth Fagerlund

Introduction

Hi,

This blog is my attempt to document all my findings as investigate and try on different projects. Most projects end up getting forgotten and discarded so I hope that I can record most of the research I do here so If I find the time to pick it up again all the work is still available.

A added bonus would be if anyone else found use of it so I will do my best to keep it informative but I wouldn't bet on it :)