Hi guys. As a lot of you probably know, Intel just announced the Tablet Classmate PC which has totally ripped off the XO's form factor & functionality, upped the hardware specs & added touchscreen capability (something I sorely miss when I switch from my nintendo DS touchscreen stylus to the XO when testing stuff) http://www.olpcnews.com/laptops/xo2/intel_beat_olpc_with_classmate_pc.html
Well, the XO still has it beat on price, low power consumption & sunlight readability. At $200 vs $499, I'd still take the XO any day. For $499, might as well get a laptop with real horsepower. That's really just too expensive for mass deployment, *ESPECIALLY* for public schools in 3rd world countries (at least from a Filipino perspective). Anyway, with dev on XO-2 in the works and with Pixel Qi working on touchscreens from what I read, here are my questions: 1) Are there any existing hooks/systems for Linux for multi-touch? That's the only proper way you can get a virtual keyboard to work for a double-touchscreen clamshell device (the feasibility of which is not sold to me because of the power consumption of running a 2nd screen vs a keyboard, and mostly mostly mostly the lack of haptic feedback from a virtual keyboard). OT, but Honestly, as an electronic musician, the 1st thing that went into my head when I saw the XO-2 concept shots was "I could write totally awesome DJ/live electronic software for this!" because for it to make any sense, multitouch would have to be in place. I don't have programming experience w/ multitouch systems, but IMHO it should be pretty easy-> it would just be basically the same as simple 8-bit (or 1-bit) single color channel image recognition systems w/ pixel array bytes substituting for pressure levels on each physical X-Y position onscreen. In fact, you could pretty much do multitouch systems with just a camera (the XO's would be good enough, the machine would just need a CPU with stronger horsepower to do the image processing :P) and any surface where discrete image sections can be formed for img recog aid, like using shadows from hands or maybe a color-reactive transparent surface where if pressure or contact is applied, a particular color shade (like a chroma key) will appear to aid img rec. Btw, on-topic w/ multitouch, these engineering students from India just came up with their own version of Jeff Han (NYU & Perceptive Pixel)'s FTIR multi-touch tech, Sparsh http://www.sparsh-i.com/ -> totally awesome and they showed a DJ app too! So back to the question: any existing Linux multi-touch hooks/drivers/APIs? (btw, refresher on Jef Han's multitouch tech: http://www.perceptivepixel.com/) 2) Audio feedback A big problem with touch-screen/virtual keyboards is lack of haptic feedback (and haptic feedback would probably eat batteries a lot). A standardized/universal audio mapping to keyboard keys similar to QWERTY, Dvorak or Braille would help solve this. This has actually been an interest of mine for the longest time because blind/visually impaired computer users could have a hard time with non-haptic keyboards or non-standard keyboard key locations. Also, this would be a great aid for blind coders, one would be able to code & read case, punctuation & special characters via tone-mapped keymappings and playback. Yes, text to speech and screen readers exist, but I think they're pretty useless for blind coders with a need for speed. Can you imagine running PERL through a text-to-speech system? A cool side effect of this would be that any kind of text would be translated to music via tonemapping or whatever audio cues are used :) (sorry guys, am a synaesthetic, all sensory data can be translated into numbers and be remapped to any other sense :P) Well, these 2 topics are very big undertakings but does anyone know any good starting points? If not, are any of these being researched at 1CC/Media Lab? I'm very much interested in researching/studying these, especially the long-term study for the HCI development/creation of a cross-platform internationally standardized keyboard/character/unicode tone/sound map (reconfigurable by users). Many thanks! -Naz -- Carlos Nazareno http://twitter.com/naz404 http://www.object404.com -- interactive media specialist zen graffiti studios http://www.zengraffiti.com -- User Group Manager Phlashers: Philippine Flash ActionScripters Adobe Flash/Flex User Group http://www.phlashers.com -- "if you don't like the way the world is running, then change it instead of just complaining." _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel