Re: multitouch

2010-06-11 Thread Martin Langhoff
On Tue, Jun 8, 2010 at 12:02 PM, Bert Freudenberg  wrote:
> It's not that hard to get an actual XO for testing. Designing on a regular PC 
> monitor doesn't do it justice, the pixels are much too large.

Yeah, XO screen pixels are very strange. The pixels themselves are
tiny, but the perception of the screen resolution is not so
straightforward.

You really have to test on the target machine.


m
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Re: [Sugar-devel] Multitouch in Fedora

2010-06-10 Thread James Cameron
On Thu, Jun 10, 2010 at 09:13:49AM +0200, Tomeu Vizoso wrote:
> I guess they are talking about something related to Unity, which is
> Canonical's UX of choice for netbooks. Unity was supposed at the UDS
> to sit in a similar place to GNOME Shell so it will most probably be
> using multi touch with Gtk+.
> 
> If anybody has more details in how this impacts OLPC and Sugar, it
> would be great if they could share.

Perhaps trivial, but Ubuntu jobs have been in my RSS feeds for a year or
two, and there's been a row of ARM related positions.

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Re: [Sugar-devel] Multitouch in Fedora

2010-06-10 Thread Tomeu Vizoso
On Wed, Jun 9, 2010 at 22:18, Peter Robinson  wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I know people were wondering about multitouch. In the last couple of
> days there's a couple of posts regarding Multitouch in fedora for
> those that are interested.
>
> http://www.j5live.com/2010/06/09/multitouch-working-in-fedora/
>
> http://blogs.gnome.org/carlosg/2010/06/09/getting-multitouch-to-just-work/

I asked around yesterday and as far as I could see nobody were
planning any specific work on (multi-)touch with Gtk+. As the
companies doing Linux products with that capability had gone with Qt.

But just now have come across this news:

http://infoworld.com/d/mobilize/canonical-developing-ubuntu-os-tablets-778

I guess they are talking about something related to Unity, which is
Canonical's UX of choice for netbooks. Unity was supposed at the UDS
to sit in a similar place to GNOME Shell so it will most probably be
using multi touch with Gtk+.

If anybody has more details in how this impacts OLPC and Sugar, it
would be great if they could share.

Regards,

Tomeu
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Multitouch in Fedora

2010-06-09 Thread Peter Robinson
Hi,

I know people were wondering about multitouch. In the last couple of
days there's a couple of posts regarding Multitouch in fedora for
those that are interested.

http://www.j5live.com/2010/06/09/multitouch-working-in-fedora/

http://blogs.gnome.org/carlosg/2010/06/09/getting-multitouch-to-just-work/

Peter
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Re: multitouch

2010-06-08 Thread Bert Freudenberg

On 08.06.2010, at 17:46, Carlos Nazareno wrote:

> a) Ratio - 4:3 -> is it possible to use a more normal/accepted
> resolution that actual monitors use so that in the future, if
> emulation works well on PCs, developers w/o XO machines can design
> their apps/GUI better?

It's not that hard to get an actual XO for testing. Designing on a regular PC 
monitor doesn't do it justice, the pixels are much too large.

If you still want that, the Sugar emulator easily does 1200x900 on e.g. a 
1280x1024 screen.

- Bert -


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Re: multitouch

2010-06-08 Thread Carlos Nazareno
a) Ratio - 4:3 -> is it possible to use a more normal/accepted
resolution that actual monitors use so that in the future, if
emulation works well on PCs, developers w/o XO machines can design
their apps/GUI better?

Like say 1280x960 or 1280x800 (WXGA) instead of 1200x900? That's not
so big a difference except that 1280x960 or 1280x800 are resolutions
that common monitors can actually use.

b) Capacitance vs. pressure
IMHO, touch with any kind of object w/ pressure rather than
capacitance which requires a human finger or a frozen sausage as
stylus ( http://www.tuaw.com/2010/02/12/frozen-sausage-as-iphone-stylus/
) is better.

One of *the* killer apps for touchscreen is drawing, and using a
stylus for precision is more natural for proper drawing than using
fingers a la finger painting. The thing is, if you use your fingers,
you won't be seeing the actual X-Y pixel you're drawing on becaue your
finger is covering it, and there's the problem of which X_Y pixel is
being detected by the OS since a finger is so wide.

Seriously, drawing on a touchscreen rocks.

I use the Colors activity of the XO http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Colors!
on my Nintendo DS http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Colors!
and drawing with the stylus on a touchscreen is an absolute joy.

Wacom sells their Cintiq touchscreen drawing panels for about $1000 and up.

You bring that ability to draw the XO with the proper app, and
interest will skyrocket!
(I can write one in AIR. It'll be slower than native code, but ought to work)

cheers!

-Naz

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Re: multitouch + audio feedback linux dev -> XO-2?

2009-01-27 Thread Wade Brainerd
On Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 11:57 PM,  wrote:

> On Mon, 26 Jan 2009, Wade Brainerd wrote:
>
> Here's to staying focused,
>>
>
> agreed, but I don't see how you can do a keyboard and not have some
> multi-touch stuff (shift keys to start with)
>
> I am in the group that has serious doubts about the current XO-2 design. I
> suspect that when push comes to shove the idea of the second screen being
> the keyboard will go the way of the crank in the XO-1
>

You've got a point about the keyboard, in my haste to rant I totally
sidestepped that :)  A piano keyboard would be pretty lame if it didn't
support chords.  That said, I was reacting to the idea that Multi-Pointer X
was the way to handle the screen from a software standpoint.  Instead, if
the hardware supports multitouch, a custom API should be developed just for
the keyboard based on instantaneous pressure.  Multi-pointer would be
overkill to a simple solution.

-Wade
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Re: multitouch + audio feedback linux dev -> XO-2?

2009-01-26 Thread david
On Mon, 26 Jan 2009, Wade Brainerd wrote:

> My (unasked for) opinion is that multitouch should not be a focus of OLPC's
> development efforts.  The real benefit will just come from being able to
> touch the screen in the first place.
>
> Writing a decent multitouch interface requires massive UI design and coding
> efforts that we frankly cannot muster right now, and the concept is so
> immature in the Linux world that we cannot rely on someone else to do it for
> us.  A real multitouch device would require a development effort similar to
> what Apple put into the iPhone, that is hundreds of engineers over several
> years with absolute control over the software stack.  Given financial
> realities that's just not going to happen with XO-2.
>
> That said, here's hoping the final solution is pressure sensitive!  The
> Nintendo DS gets all kinds of wonderful features out of that, and it's
> already part of XInput.
>
> Imagine the possibilities of a screen that can become any kind of keyboard
> you can imagine (computer, piano, drum, painting canvas, etc).
>
> Here's to staying focused,

agreed, but I don't see how you can do a keyboard and not have some 
multi-touch stuff (shift keys to start with)

I am in the group that has serious doubts about the current XO-2 design. I 
suspect that when push comes to shove the idea of the second screen being 
the keyboard will go the way of the crank in the XO-1
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Re: multitouch + audio feedback linux dev -> XO-2?

2009-01-26 Thread Wade Brainerd
My (unasked for) opinion is that multitouch should not be a focus of OLPC's
development efforts.  The real benefit will just come from being able to
touch the screen in the first place.

Writing a decent multitouch interface requires massive UI design and coding
efforts that we frankly cannot muster right now, and the concept is so
immature in the Linux world that we cannot rely on someone else to do it for
us.  A real multitouch device would require a development effort similar to
what Apple put into the iPhone, that is hundreds of engineers over several
years with absolute control over the software stack.  Given financial
realities that's just not going to happen with XO-2.

That said, here's hoping the final solution is pressure sensitive!  The
Nintendo DS gets all kinds of wonderful features out of that, and it's
already part of XInput.

Imagine the possibilities of a screen that can become any kind of keyboard
you can imagine (computer, piano, drum, painting canvas, etc).

Here's to staying focused,

-Wade

On Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 11:25 PM,  wrote:

> On Tue, 27 Jan 2009, Carlos Nazareno wrote:
>
> > 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).
> 
> > So back to the question: any existing Linux multi-touch
> hooks/drivers/APIs?
>
> there has been some discussion on the kernel mailing list recently. they
> are still hammering out what reasonable APIs will be (different
> multi-touch systems provide different capabilities)
>
> David Lang
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Re: multitouch + audio feedback linux dev -> XO-2?

2009-01-26 Thread david
On Tue, 27 Jan 2009, Carlos Nazareno wrote:

> 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).

> So back to the question: any existing Linux multi-touch hooks/drivers/APIs?

there has been some discussion on the kernel mailing list recently. they 
are still hammering out what reasonable APIs will be (different 
multi-touch systems provide different capabilities)

David Lang
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Re: multitouch + audio feedback linux dev -> XO-2?

2009-01-26 Thread Nate Ridderman
On Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 7:22 PM, Nirav Patel  wrote:

> 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).
>>
>
> Peter Hutterer has been working on Multi-Pointer X for several years.
> It is getting pretty usable, judging by the Youtube videos.
> http://wearables.unisa.edu.au/mpx/
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olWjnfBoY8E
>

Jim Gettys put together a synopsis of multi-touch input for XO-2 in
September - http://wiki.laptop.org/images/9/99/Gen-2_touch.pdf

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.
>>
>
I have some insight into this topic from experience in the cell phone
industry. There are several ways to do haptic responses: linear vibrators,
piezo-electric elements, speakers. Localized haptics are best (the vibration
comes from the area on the screen that has been touched), but that's still
an emerging technology. The challenge with your idea is latency. For
applications like typing, the haptic response must happen very quickly to
trick the brain into thinking it is related to the press. I think I've heard
the number 25 ms before, but don't quote me on that. A quick google search
couldn't confirm or deny this. I did find an interesting paper (
http://aig.cs.man.ac.uk/people/jayc/jay_quantifying_latency.pdf) that stated
100-200 ms was the limit, but I don't think the results apply to typing. The
game in their experiment took a second to complete, which is way longer than
a keystroke takes. If you don't care about typing repeatedly, the latency is
less important. But for typing quickly with a  limit of 25 ms, it will be
hard to interrupt the processor, load a sound file, and play it in time. A
dedicated microprocessor might be up to the task though.

Also, I'm not sure if a speaker would draw significantly less power than a
piezo or linear vibrator. I don't remember hard numbers for either use case.

Thanks,
Nate
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Re: multitouch + audio feedback linux dev -> XO-2?

2009-01-26 Thread Nirav Patel
> 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).

Peter Hutterer has been working on Multi-Pointer X for several years.
It is getting pretty usable, judging by the Youtube videos.
http://wearables.unisa.edu.au/mpx/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olWjnfBoY8E

> 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.

You can use the pygame camera module to do "multitouch" on an XO,
though it is far from usable for anything but drawing.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIDdxY3L5V8

Nirav
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multitouch + audio feedback linux dev -> XO-2?

2009-01-26 Thread Carlos Nazareno
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

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Re: Synaptics multitouch.

2008-06-04 Thread Bert Freudenberg

On 04.06.2008, at 21:39, Chris Ball wrote:

> Hi,
>
>> Looks like Synaptics touchpads can detect (up to three?) fingers
>> independently.  This would allow us to start prototyping multitouch
>> software using normal laptops.
>
> Ah, looks like I'm wrong.  It can detect how many fingers are held  
> down
> -- which means that you can specify gestures that only fire when the
> required number of fingers are down -- but there's only one set of x/y
> coordinates coming from the touchpad rather than one set per finger.


The new Dell Latitude XT tablet supposedly has a capacitive multi- 
touch screen. N o word about driver support yet, afaik.

- Bert -


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Re: Synaptics multitouch.

2008-06-04 Thread Chris Ball
Hi,

   > Looks like Synaptics touchpads can detect (up to three?) fingers
   > independently.  This would allow us to start prototyping multitouch
   > software using normal laptops.

Ah, looks like I'm wrong.  It can detect how many fingers are held down
-- which means that you can specify gestures that only fire when the
required number of fingers are down -- but there's only one set of x/y
coordinates coming from the touchpad rather than one set per finger.

- Chris.
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Synaptics multitouch.

2008-06-04 Thread Chris Ball
Hi,

This article's very interesting:

   http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/os-touchpad/

Looks like Synaptics touchpads can detect (up to three?) fingers
independently.  This would allow us to start prototyping multitouch
software using normal laptops.

- Chris.
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