Multitouch

Ideum Releases MT65 Presenter Multitouch Wall Display

We’re pleased to announce the release of the Ideum MT65 Presenter multitouch wall display. The MT65 Presenter is a huge 65” interactive display with a 3D LCD, robust multitouch sensor, ultra-clear tempered glass, a powerful integrated computer, built-in audio, and webcam housed inside a hardened aluminum case.

The Presenter is easy to install and maintain, virtually indestructible, and works in practically any ambient lighting environment. The integrated touch sensor supports up to 32 simultaneous touch points for multiple user exhibits. The 4” thin Presenter is protected by hardened 3mm tempered glass and a vandal-proof metal housing.

The Presenter features a 65” 3D LCD display with full HD resolution and flicker-free FPR 3D imaging that uses an LED backlight rated for 50,000 hours. The massive interactive display is over 2.5 times larger than the Samsung SUR40 Microsoft Surface 2.

The powerful built-in computer features an Intel® Core™ i7 CPU, 8GB of RAM, Solid State Hard Drive, and a discrete GPU, making the Presenter more than three times faster than the Samsung SUR40 Surface 2.0, and likely to outperform any other touchscreen on the market.

The MT65 Presenter includes built-in WIFI, Bluetooth, and Ethernet connectivity. It also features stereo speakers, an external HD webcam with Carl Zeiss® optics and a stereo microphone. The Presenter has HDMI input/output that allows you to easily mirror the device’s display, or it can receive input from another device.

An optional locking plate secures the Presenter’s Ethernet, HDMI, 3.5mm Audio in/out, and USB 2.0 ports against unwanted access. Similar to Ideum’s MT55 Series of multitouch tables, the Presenter features single-button operation. Just plug it in and turn it on.

Every MT65 Presenter ships with a full, lifetime, licensed copy of GestureWorks 3 for ActionScript. GestureWorks® for ActionScript provides streamlined multitouch authoring for multitouch walls, tables, desktops, tablets, and embedded devices. You’ll save precious development time and have access to pre-built gestures and the world’s first markup language for multitouch: GestureML. In addition, GestureWorks® SDK has a powerful touch point cluster analysis system, a built-in simulator, and includes access to pre-built modules.

For more information, please download and read the MT65 Presenter Press Release.

MT65 Presenter Press Release
(Updated: 01-17-12) (49kb)

You can also read about the MT65 Presenter on Engadget

100 Years Exhibition at the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center

Early next month, 100 Years of State & Federal Policy: The Impact on Pueblo Nations exhibition opens at the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The exhibit is tied to the state of New Mexico’s Centennial which happens this year. We’ve  been working with the Cultural Center to develop two interactive exhibits for the exhibition. We’re designing the software and hardware, the Cultural Center has been been developing media including a series of videos for the exhibit.

The Document Table is a multitouch table exhibit that allows visitors to learn more about the important events that have impacted the Pueblo Nations over the last 100 years. Along with exploring the documents, visitors can view them on a large, 55″ secondary screen adjacent to the table. (The multitouch table is an MT55 Platform with custom color.)

The Interactive Timeline is a dual monitor exhibit that uses a custom-built, touch-enabled ultra-wide display to present the timeline. (The ultra-wide display has a 16:4.5 aspect ratio, 1920 x 508 pixels, you can see a photo of touch display on our Flickr site.) As visitors make selections a large 42″ display presents video, photos, and descriptive text. Both exhibits are using software components from Open Exhibits.

These two interactive exhibits will help communicate the overall message of the exhibition:

This exhibition and its public programming will reflect upon the human experience behind enacted policies and laws on Pueblo communities by other governments. It will add to a well-documented history of Pueblo resilience since the time of Emergence. Interviews with Pueblo members will provide visitors with historical and personal reflections to help them understand and appreciate these historic challenges, often imposed through policy and laws, all intended to purposefully remove Pueblo people away from their core values.

The opening is on February 4, 2012 at 1:00 PM. There are a number of events associated with the exhibition planned through the rest of the year. You can learn more on the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center website: www.indianpueblo.org/100years

Linux Support Coming to the MT55

Here at Ideum labs, we’ve been hard at work developing a new Linux driver for our MT Series multitouch tables and displays.

Beginning in March, Linux users and developers will be able to take full advantage of the gesture-driven, social features of MT55 Pro table, MT55 Platform table, and the new MT65 Presenter wall display with native multitouch and GestureWorks support for applications deployed in Ubuntu.

Running multitouch applications on our devices will be plug and play. Touch data from our driver will be exposed to both the TUIO protocol and by Linux’s native multitouch protocol. In the future, we plan to expand support to include the Linux X11 API’s, bringing full compatibility to both the Qt and GTK+ (Gimp toolkit) frameworks.

There is good news for Linux ActionScript developers as well. GestureWorks 3 authoring environment is compatible with several IDE’s in Linux, including Flash Builder 4. 5, FDT, and OSFlash.

Sign up for our newsletter or follow us on Twitter to learn about the upcoming release.

GestureWorks and Touch Revolution at CES 2012

GestureWorks built software will be showcased in the Touch Revolution booth at CES 2012 in Las Vegas in January. GestureWorks is our own commercial multitouch authoring framework. If you’re at CES stop by the booth and check out our software and Touch Revolution’s multitouch displays.The Touch Revolution booth will be located at South 1 -20248. Last year, we showed off our multitouch Asteroids game (see below). This year we will have a new demo to show.

You can purchase GestureWorks bundled with the Touch Revolution 21.5″ TRū™ Touch Monitor in the TouchRev store.

GestureWorks 3 Released!

Our commercial multitouch framework, GestureWorks 3 is now available. There are a lot of new features including the introduction of the Gesture Markup Language, the world’s first markup language for multitouch. GestureML allows developers to rapidly change gesture interaction even after an application has been built. This flexibility helps address challenges in the design process, as creating user interface for multitouch and multiuser applications is still a new endeavor.

GestureWorks 3 is completely rebuilt and we greatly improved the way the software analyzes gesture interaction.  With GestureWorks 3, “objects” behave more like objects do in real world and the software can determine no only user touch points, but also their orientation.  To demonstrate this new feature we developed a built-in gesture visualizer.  Here’s a video of the gesture visualizer.

There’s lots more in GestureWorks 3, you can learn more on the GestureWorks website or check out the Press Release on PR Newswire.

Ideum Featured in New Mexico Business Weekly

The New Mexico Business Weekly wrote a feature article on Ideum last week. The article focuses on our multitouch tables, GestureWorks, custom exhibit development, and our approach to doing business.

The full article (both online and in print) requires a subscription, but you can see a preview on on the Biz Journal site, Ideum’s touch tables bring exhibits, displays to life. (Photo by Randy Siner | NMBW)

MT55 Developer Partner Program

Ideum is fortunate to work with a network of some of the best multitouch designers and developers in the world. This holiday season, we are particularly thankful for our Developer Partners.

We’d love to program every computer-based exhibit that comes our way, but we don’t always have the capacity. In those situations, our partners are an integral component to the success of the MT55 multitouch table, and the satisfaction of our clients.

If you are searching for a firm to design and develop your next multi-touch application or interactive exhibit, we highly recommend contacting one of our partners. To view a list of our partners, and recent installations please visit our Partner Page.

Interested in becoming a partner? The Ideum Developer Partner Program allows you to offer your clients the best multitouch tables available with exclusive hardware discounts, free software, marketing opportunities and other benefits. If you would like to apply, please contact us.

GestureWorks 3 Release Next Week: Good News for Flash Developers

Next Tuesday we will be release a new version of GestureWorks, our multitouch framework for ActionScript. GestureWorks 3 is an entirely new build, we started over and rebuilt it from scratch.

GestureWorks developers will have access to the most advanced multitouch authoring environment yet developed. It includes a comprehensive Gesture Visualizer, a built-in multitouch simulator, and it introduces the world’s first markup language for multitouch; Gesture ML with definitions for scores of gestures.  ActionScript developers in Flash, Flash Builder, Flash Develop, and FDT can creating powerful gesture-driven apps that can be published as SWF files, exe, or AIR apps.

In a year where there has been seemingly no positive news about Adobe Flash, we think GestureWorks is great news for Flash developers. We believe that ActionScript and Flash are important and powerful tools for application development. While HTML5 has a great deal of promise, and it will likely be increasingly important in the future; it lacks the power and flexibility that ActionScript and Flash currently provide. We need to make applications now and we’re not alone.

GestureWorks 3 was major effort here at Ideum and it represents almost a year of development. GestureWorks is primarily self-funded, however, the project did receive some important help and we are very thankful to have received $100,000 from the Venture Acceleration Fund (VAF) launched by Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The software and the new website will be unveiled next Tuesday, November 29th. We’re excited, we hope you are too.

Boeing presents MT55 Pro-based Training Solution at I/ITSEC 2011

The MT55 Pro has been widely adopted by museums and other public spaces. It’s rugged, large-format, high-performance design makes it perfectly suited for defense applications, as well. A perfect example is the Boeing Virtual Mission Board.™

Boeing’s Training Systems and Services uses a highly customized build of the MT55 Pro as the hardware backbone of its Virtual Mission Board™ — a multitouch table for mission planning and rehearsal, exercise control and after-action reviews for military ground forces. The Virtual Mission Board™ can be experienced next week at I/ITSEC — the world’s largest modeling, simulation and training conference.

Stop in at Booth #749 to learn more about the Virtual Mission Board,™ and to interact with the MT55 Pro. The conference runs Nov. 28th – Dec. 1st, 2011 in the West Concourse of the Orange County Convention Center.

The Tech Test Zone Opening and Gigapixel Kinect Exhibit

Last week I spoke at The Tech Museum’s Interfaces for the New Decade Conference and Gallery Opening. It was a great opportunity to meet and connect with folks from many of the Bay Area museums (and local companies) who share the same interest in new HCI (Human Computer Interaction) technologies. Along with the day-long conference there was an evening Gallery opening which unveiled The Tech Test Zone exhibit.

At the opening party we demoed Heist, our experimental project that allows digital objects to be shared from a multitouch table to visitor’s smart phones and tablets. We brought a MT55 Platform multitouch table for the demo and conference.
While Heist is not part of the permanent exhibit our Open Exhibit’s Kinect and Gigapixel Viewer software is. Visitors to the Test Zone can use gestures to navigate an amazing gigapixel image of Yosemite taken by xRez Studio. This Open Exhibits software exhibit is among the first installations in our year-old National Science Foundation sponsored project.  (You can join Open Exhibits for free.)
CNET News has pictures of all of the exhibits including our and their Website, see Future tech exhibit plugs museum interactivity.