Merry Christmas !!!

What ??? Multitouch is a world full of dudes ;-)

Anyway, Merry Christmas !!!

November's update - v2

Edit : thanks to Aggut on NUI's forum, I included winusb.dll & winusb.sys in the .zip. The topic is here. I changed the host of the file too (divshare.com) because a friend showed my this and I've found it pretty cool.

Edit 2 : don't worry if the date of the file seems to change a lot, I try to fix some minor things. For instance the blobDetection algorithm was doing 2 times its job until today... Now it really is smooth in 640x480.

Hi !

It's been two months since my last post so here it is, updates !

Version 2 of Otira is out. OpenCV is gone so it's only usable if you got a PS3 Eye. Here is a screenshot of the config app :

So far the configuration part is finished, there won't be any major modification any time soon since it's not an important part of the software, even if it's pretty slow when using 640x480 (after all the purpose is to see the effect of a threshold). The app itself isn't really done, it will display your hands if you set the threshold correctly and then display blobs. The way this part is done in the program will be changed I think since I run @ 20-25 fps on a core duo 2,16GHz when the resolution is set on 640x480. I do this by creating GL_POINTS and maybe use a dynamic texture will be more efficient. If you got another idea please feel free to share it !

The big issue is the redeployment part. Since I don't know how to redistribute applications which are compiled with visual express' compiler, I hope it's runable on other machines. Please tell me if you're experiencing any trouble or if you know how I can make the program easy to use for everyone.

The wiki is to come, so far I just put some comments in the files.

In the meantime, I'll work on the physical part and start to build the device in order to have a real thing to experiment on.

To conclude, just a big thank you to AlexP for his work, it's a real pleasure to program with his SDK and I'm sure he makes lots of guys go happy with it ;-)

Have fun !

What's going on ?

Today I've received a PS3 Eye cam. I've chosen this webcam because I need a good image quality and a high frame rate. Thanks to AlexP on the NUI Group's forum (you can find the topic here), a driver is available to use the PS3 cam with a computer.  So far it can't be use in an other program but I hope it'll be available soon.

I keep my Logitech QuickCam Messenger (I think it's its name ???) to develop the software. So far every part works. I cap in 320x240 @ 30 FPS and it's fluent once blobs are displayed with opengl. However the image of the hands isn't displayed at the same time (I have only one webcam working)  so I hope that having to process 2 webcam at the same time won't be a problem (I use a notebook with 1GB of RAM cadenced at 2,16 GHz (core duo)).

My next steps are to make Otira faster. Apparently I use a slow opencv function to get pixels' values ( I use the "Indirect access method" : http://www.cs.iit.edu/~agam/cs512/lect-notes/opencv-intro/index.html). The stability of the captured image is to be improved to. The coming tough part is the opengl side of the project. I'm not really good at making efficient UI. If someone knows a good UI, send me a message ;-)

Welcome abord

This is about the dev part (let's hope it'll be short ;-) ) of Otira, an other multitouch software/interface. The purpose is to create a program able to take care of everything (webcam management, computing, rendering...) and make it work on an interface.

The interface would be like the Lucidtouch developped by Microsoft (see here).

Otira is based on opencv and developped in C++ under Windows with CodeBlocks, but i'm sure it runs everywhere.

So far version 1 is available (see download section - for info the .exe is in the bin/debug directory - you must have opencv installed on your computer, there is a link on the right side) and is able to track blobs. However it's not really usable since it has never been run on more than one setup.

A wiki will come soon in order to make things clear to my and people who would like to give Otira a try.