I’m attending ITS 2010 – the ACM International Conference on Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces 2010 in Saarbrücken, Germany. This is a short collection of interesting stuff I’ve seen and heard on day 1 (Sunday, 6. November 2010).
(people testing the multitouch device they just built)
Sunday started with four tutorials:
Sheelagh Carpendale (University of Calgary) gave an introduction into qualitative evaluation and observation of tabletop interaction. We did an experiment where she would tell us a story and we should draw a continuous line somehow representing the mood of the characters in the story. I found it quite interesting that there were completely different looking drawings but some drawings looked quite similar. I wonder whether you could find out which persons have a similar understanding of a story. Looks like a great method for match-making.
Uli von Zadow (Archimedes Solutions) gave a very interesting overview of multitouch sensing APIs and implementation details of common processing stages (e.g. it is not a good idea to put successive processing stages on different processors as this makes the processor cache pretty much useless).
Florian Echtler (Hochschule München) presented an overview of multitouch sensing techniques [I did not attend the talk as I’m pretty familiar with his work].
And finally, Anne Roudaut (HPI Potsdam) organized a really cool “build your own multitouch” session where about 50 participants built a simple touch-sensitive surface using FTIR with visible light and a cheap webcam. You can find the instructions online on her Acrylicpad page. They got really cheap (5 EUR) webcams on eBay. However, they only worked with Windows XP – and of course Linux 🙂
Afterwards we had a nice get-together at the Ratskeller in Saarbrücken.
Photo taken from the official Facebook album:
Reflected Total Internal Frustration 