Re: multitouch + audio feedback linux dev - XO-2?
On Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 11:57 PM, da...@lang.hm 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 ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
multitouch + audio feedback linux dev - XO-2?
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
Re: multitouch + audio feedback linux dev - XO-2?
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 ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: multitouch + audio feedback linux dev - XO-2?
On Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 7:22 PM, Nirav Patel o...@spongezone.net 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 ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: multitouch + audio feedback linux dev - XO-2?
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). SNIP 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 ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: multitouch + audio feedback linux dev - XO-2?
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, da...@lang.hm 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). SNIP 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 ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: multitouch + audio feedback linux dev - XO-2?
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 ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
