Ideum, a company that develops computer and web exhibits for museums, announced today that they have released their own large multi-touch table, the mt² Table.

With screen 50" diagonal screem the mt² is significantly larger than Microsoft Surface (30" diagonal). It also offers higher resolutions, 1280 x 720 compared to Microsoft Surface's 1024 x 768, and it looks really cool to boot!

What I really like about the Ideum mt² Table is that it uses the NUI Suite 1.0 Snowflake gesture recognition system which supports the TUIO protocol and can therefore be programmed in several languages including Adobe ActionScript 3 (Flash), Java, C#, C/C++ and even Python. I would love to write a multi-touch application in Flash!

The table also comes with preinstalled software including multi-media viewer, an implementation of Google Earth, a 3D model render, and a few other things. It looks great except for the life of the bulb which is 3,000 hours compared to 6,000 hours for the Surface (projections bulbs are expensive). I'm not sure what the pricing or availability is yet - I'll update this post when I find out.

Wintellect will start offering training courses in Microsoft Surface this Spring. The first course offering, Mastering Microsoft Surface develoment with WPF, will be April 20 -24th, 2009 in Dallas, Texas. It's 1o days and 50 hours long.

This is the first time, to my knowlage, that Surface training has been offered outside of Redmond's campus. In fact, I think I attended the very last Surface training offered by Microsoft itself. From this point forward (I think) all training will be provided by Wintellect and eventaully DevelopMentor. At any rate, if you want training in Microsoft Surface your best bet is Wintellect in Dallas this April. No details on DevelopMentor training are available yet.

With price points for multi-touch table devices coming in at around $7,000 to $20,000 US its not like everyone who loves the technology can afford to buy one. In fact, just about everyone who comments on Microsoft Surface for the first time talks about how cool it is and then how its too expensive.

Those of you who are not as crazy as I am (I bought my own Surface despite the price point) may want to consider building your own multi-touch surface. That's exactly what a combined inter-disciplinary team of students from the Govt. Engineering College, Bikaner did. They used the open source Touchlib multi-touch SDK and advice from the NUI Group along with some affordable equipment to build a wonderful multi-touch device programmed in Adobe Flash.

Sparsh (Hindu for "touch") is the name of their project and you can see a really compelling video of it and what they programmed it to do. The team (Anirudh, Ashish, Rahul, Sudanshu, and Swami) built their own surface device out of plywood, Plexiglas off the shelf components and a little secrete sauce of their own making.

Specifically the device, according to emails communications with Anirudh, was built with the following components:

Hardware

Table's Touching Area: 1m X .568m
Infrared LED Illuminator's rating: 120mw/sr.
Projector enclosed: Mitsubishi XD 490U
IR detector: Modified Microsoft LifeCam VX1000, detects upto 30 Frames/second
Graphics Accelerator: NVidiA Geforce

Software
MS Windows XP/Vista, DirectX 11 Sept. Update, Open GL, Adobe Flash CS3, AS3
Tracker: modified Touchlib v1.0 beta

The most expensive component is probably the projector which retails for between $1,800.00 and $2,500 US brand new (used models can probably found cheaper). The least expensive component was probably their own special formula for a compliant surface which is needed in order for their method of gesture detection they used (FTIR). I won't go in to details but that particular component can be very expensive but our friends from India found a solution that costs only $5.00 US per unit.

The team based much of their design on guidance they obtained from the NUI Group. NUI Group is commercial company specializing in multi-touch but they also host a thriving open source multi-touch community where you can find a plethora of information on building your own multi-touch device. Just check out the videos of all the home made multi-touch devices features on the NUI Group web site. It's inspiring.

The Sparsh team is currently distracted with final exams (remember they are students) and so have temporarily halted work on Sparsh, but not for long. After graduation the team will probably, again according to Anirudh, develop of a much larger multi-touch wall. The members of the team are very interested in becoming deeply involved in multi-touch device development and are looking for summer internship. If I had my druthers I would hire them in a second for an internship. If you are looking to fund a multi-touch start-up, Sparsh will probably give you the most buck for your investment dollars. There located in India, they are students, and they are obviously very productive. A good investment for any venture capitalist or angel investor looking to break into the multi-touch device market.

My hat is off to the Sparsh team as well as all the inventors who have contributed to the NUI Group community. Building my own surface device that uses Flash would be a wonderful experience but given my current building skills (I’m dangerous at best) and my schedule (I’m totally booked right now) its not going to happen anytime soon.

Frequently the best multi-touch gestures are done with a single finger. The advantage of using a single finger to manipulate a multi-touch surface are compelling. For one thing, a single finger gesture is frequently easier to execute than multiple finger gestures. And, in my opinion, single finger gestures can be much more intuitive then multi-finger gestures.

As an example lets compare the ubiquitous "pinch" gesture popularized by the iPhone, which shrinks or stretches visuals, to the Linja Zax gesture developed by Linja Design Oy of Helsinki Finland. The pinch gesture obviously requires two fingers of one hand with the iPhone or fingers from two hands with something like the surface. While the pinch works really well, it requires frequent and repeated pinching or stretching to progressively zoom out of or into a image. Do this gesture on a global map on a big touch screen enough times and you'll soon get tired of it. The Linja Zax gesture, on the other hand requires only a single finger which traces a spiral. With each spiral (a circle gesture really) the image zooms in or out depending on whether you move your finger clockwise or counter clockwise. It's very simple to remember and to execute and is an excellent alternative to pinching and stretching.

Another example is the Swype keyboard developed by Swype of Seattle, Washington. Swype allows you to enter text by dragging your finger and pausing on keys rather than thumbing, henpecking or touch typing. It's really handy with small devices. Swype allows you to type fairly fast or even really fast when combined with predictive logic. It's a nice alternative to pecking away at a keyboard on a small device.

There are plenty of other examples of nice single finger gestures including the archetype button press, but also other less known examples like the “tack” in which you start with the tip of the finger and roll on to the pad of your finger to indicate tacking something down (sorry I can't find the video that shows that one).

The point is: when talking about multi-touch we should not insist that multiple fingers be used at all times. What is more important is that multiple fingers can be used to allow social computing or more sophisticated gestures. In general, however, I think multi-finger gestures should be used sparingly. Why use two or three fingers (or sometimes a whole hand) to do what can be done with one finger?

Of course its easy to see people going overboard with this – like videos I’ve seen where user have to memorize a number glyphs in order to request menus or help or whatnot. Single-finger gestures are extremely important tool in multi-touch design but like all gestures they should be intuitive and discoverable.

I'm really excited to announce that I have accepted a position as the Sr. Experience Architect at Customer Solutions Group (CSG)! I went out to Denver and interviewed with CSG this past Thursday and Friday and was offered the job this weekend.

I'm really excited for a few reasons:

1st: I get to do Surface development full time.
2nd: I get to develop really cool surface applications with real business value.
3rd: The folks at CSG are top notch and their product and business plan are rock solid.

Sadly, I can't say much more than that right now as CSG is kind of in stealth mode. I'm really looking forward to sharing what I'll be doing with everyone when I can.

In the mean time, thank you to everyone for all your help in finding new employment. It was really fun talking to other companies and I'm honored that this old dog was considered to be of some value by those with whom I interviewed. It was a difficult decision because there are a lot of great companies out there!

On a last note, my heart goes out to other people who have been laid off. It's hard not to see a layoff as an indictment of your own career but don't take it that way. Lots of people of the best caliber are getting pink slips these days.