After working on the back-end site i ‘m now dealing with the front-end for multi-touch applications. After some research i come finally to the incredible MT4J framework. As I’m a real java fan i pleased to see that this framework exists and it’s absolutely brilliant! I don’t know what this guy is doing all the time but he is a master of software architecture & openGL . It’s impressive to see what performance boost you get if you work with openGL in the right way.With this framework your are able to concentrate on the interaction design and you could integrate stuff from processing, so there are a lot of code floating around the web you could use.

It’s a big argument to stay on the java platform.I know most of the people love Flash, but java is in my opinion generally the greatest platform you can develop with. You got eclipse, processing,server&database stuff, openGL with jogl and a lot of physical computing code with wiring for the arduino board. And the language itself is a thousand times better to deal with as with C++.

If you look through the NUI Forum you always see the question about which camera should i use for multi-touch?

The quick answer is: It’s depend on your budget and how much cameras you are trying to use at the same time.

I only have experience with three cameras that most of the multi-touch developer’s use :

PS3, Unibrain Fire-I and the PointGrey FireFly .

From my experience all cameras are sufficiently for the image processing you do with multi-touch and it’s more important to make the right filter settings on your software, or get the right light situation then to deal with the questions like: what’s the right sensor (CMOS/CCD?) . The cameras differ in price so what are the pro & cons of the models?

PS3: This seems to be the camera of choice for most of the multi-touch developers out there, and if you look at the price and it’s capabilities you know why. You get no cheaper camera with the same FPS. But there are some drawbacks you have to deal with: No cs-mount for objectives, you can’t mount the camera on ball-heads for adjustments and if you want to make a multi camera set-up you have to look for some third party driver.

Unibrain Fire-I: A good Firewire camera but with the lack of a real professional housing. There are a tripod mounting kit and some cs-mount adapter, but for the price you should get some more professional stuff.

PointGrey Firefly MV: This is a marvelous camera with an incredible driver suite.  PointGrey has a long time experience with multi-cam setups so you get a professional system, but this has it’s price. The real advance comes with multi-cam set-ups, but  you end up quickly in a 1000$ system only for cameras and objectives.

So for the first steps into multi-touch i prefer the PS3 . For that price you can’t go wrong! If you want to make huge multi-cam setups i prefer a Firewire PointGrey system, but this could change if the CL-Eye Platform (I’m will test in the future) deal with the USB bandwidth problems that most of the times arise with USB systems. If this will work the price difference will be so huge, that you could live with the PS3 drawbacks (no cs-mount,housing) .

I never thought that c++ development could be so much pain. If you come from other languages you are spoiled with a lot of features, but get a punch in your face if you trying to do similar things in c++. As an longtime Actionscripter and java guy, i decided to start some c++ development, because i wanted to do more things with openFrameworks.
The first lesson i learnt is to mess more with the compiler then with c++ as language. I use Visual Studio ,as I’m on Windows and was a little disappointed of some missing features for pure c++ development i used to know from eclipse like refactoring and intellisense. If you develop in c# you have all this features in Visual Studio.
The next big thing are the overwhelming compiler settings i had no clue about. So where do you start from? If you grab some C++ books you always get only information about OPP, what is inheritance and all the other stuff that tells you only some language features. But if you develop your first program , you get stuck with missing libraries, memory pitfalls or weired c-string stuff you don’t understand. (And not to mention the problems with proper linking your program).
I understand people who are afraid of this whole c++ mess.(I always was and be by myself).

After endless google sessions and some c++ books that didn’t covered  the right information i found two useful books:

Windows via c++ : This is a incredible Book about a lot of Windows internals and you get a deep understanding of the operation system you have to know and be aware of if you decide to do C++ development. This book is not like ‘learning C++ in 25 days’ , it’s gives you information about compiler settings, DLL development, process and thread management…., all the topics i didn’t find in other books, but essential for application development on Windows.

C++ for Game Programmers (second edition) The title of the Book is a little bit of misleading, as this is a book to learn C++ as a language and gave you tons of useful info’s about some design decision’s for your code that are general and not only game related. One of the highlights are the chapter about plug-in architecture and information about the STL.

Another treasure i found. Back in 2001 i made my last house tape for a women. When i hear the sound i feel i better should have made a DJ career as i get in the mood for dance. Listen to the track of Jovonn and you know why I love the real deep underground house sound !

House Mix 2001 [ 0:01 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

After digging in my old CD’s i found two mixes i made for my formerly girlfriend. Well the girl is gone, but the music remains. Thanks the Lord.

House Mix 2000 [ 0:01 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

If you want start with multi-touch development you have to decide what topics you are interested.
Some prefer only the interaction design, others trying to build their own soft-/hardware from the ground. Whatever you like the nuigroup forum is THE starting point on the net. There are a lot of information spread all around the forum. Without the help of so many community members I never would have achieved the things i develop.

To get the historical background and wider context on this field you should go to the site of Bill Buxton. He is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft and if somebody has a credibility on this topic then he. There is a very interesting talk from the CES 2010 with him about NUI: CES 2010: NUI with Bill Buxton

In my spare time i try to publish some tapes as podcasts. Hope anybody enjoys ‘real good’ music.

After two years in the field of multi-touch development i decided to start this blog as an information hub for others. I will post useful information from me and others mostly related to programming, computer art and music. And this site will be acting as an shameless self promotion tool 😎