NEWS AND UPDATES FROM IDEUM

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.

See the MT55 Pro Multitouch Table at IAAPA in Orlando

Ideum will be presenting the new MT55 Pro multitouch table with Magian Media Studio at the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions (IAAPA) Expo 2011, in Orlando next week. Learn more about the conference on the IAAPA website.

The Expo runs Nov. 14-18, 2011, at the Orange County Convention Center.
Please stop by Booth #750 if you will be in attendance. We look forward to connecting with you in Orlando!

Events at The Tech and the Maxwell Museum

Last week we conducted a workshop at the British Museum in London and hosted an open house to show off Open Exhibits software and our MT55 Platform multitouch table. Our next two events are at The Tech Museum in San Jose and the Maxwell Museum right here in New Mexico.

Connecting the iPhone to the multitouch table. You can see photos and learn more about the event at British Museum on the Open Exhibits blog.

On November 15th, we’ll be at The Tech Museum in San Jose participating in the Interfaces for the New Decade – Conference and Gallery Opening. You can get tickets for the day long event or you can come by the free evening reception. We will be demoing the Heist software project,which allows visitors to “steal” digital objects from a multitouch table using their mobile devices. We will also have a demo of our Open Exhibits Gigapixel Viewer controlled by a Microsoft Kinect.  If you’re in the Bay Area and want to check out our MT55 Platform multitouch table we will have one at the Tech.

A ceramic head from Guatemala, traced to the Postclassic Mayan times (AD 100-1697)

On December 2nd, we’ll be at the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology on the University of New Mexico campus in Albuquerque.   We will be running Heist software on the Maxwell’s MT55 Pro multitouch table. The touch table will show digital objects from the “Look Close See Far: A Cultural Portrait of the Maya” exhibit which features objects the Maxwell’s Mayan collection. The event runs from 4 to 6:30 PM. You can learn more on the Maxwell site, look under Events. The Maxwell Museum is one of our museum partners for the Open Exhibits project funded by the National Science Foundation.

MT55 Platform Multitouch Table Stress Test

Here at Ideum, we take pride in building the most ruggedized multitouch tables in the world. When Microsoft announced the Samsung SUR40 Surface 2.0 ®, they referred to it as a ”Ruggedized PC… designed for industrial commercial application, ” bragging that the Samsung SUR40 Surface 2.0 ® “can take the impact of a beer bottle dropped from 18 inches without breaking.” We respectfully disagree with Microsoft’s definition of ruggedized.

Ideum’s multitouch tables are designed and engineered to withstand significantly more abuse than a falling beer bottle. Last year we dropped a 13 lb. bowling ball on our MT-50 multitouch table (now discontinued). Just last week, we opted to repeat “The Bowling Ball Test” on our sleek new MT55 Platform multitouch table. Admittedly, we worried that we might be pushing the limits of careful engineering…

How did the MT55 Platform perform? Watch this amazing video to find out:

As “The Bowling Ball Test” demonstrates Ideum’s multitouch tables are truly ruggedized for public use; built from aircraft-grade aluminum, cold-rolled steel and protected by a hardened glass surface. This level of stress testing ensures that the Ideum MT55 series will meet or exceed the demands of busy public environments, blending strength, high performance and exceptional design into a plug-and-play form factor. Don’t try this with any other multitouch table.

A video tour of the MT55 Platform can be seen here, or viewed on our youTube page. For more information, high-resolution photographs, pricing and specifications for the MT55 Pro and Platform multitouch tables visit this page.

Video Tour of the MT55 Platform Multitouch Table

We’ve just published an informal video tour of the MT55 Platform multitouch table. View the video below or head to our Vimeo or YouTube page to learn about the major features, benefits, and initial set up procedure for the MT55.

Jump to 2:27 to watch the a full installation (from crate to use) in one-minute sixteen seconds. It doesn’t get much easier than that.

For pricing, specifications and more information on the MT55 Platform visit the product page.

Open Exhibits, Year Two

Our Open Exhibits multitouch software initiative has just completed its first year. Last year, we received funding from the National Science Foundation and we launched our full community site last November. We’ve learned a lot in year one and we are gearing up for an exciting second year.

If you haven’t been following developments on the Open Exhibits site, here’s an update:

The Heist project was announced today. Heist is an experimental project that uses Open Exhibits and GestureWorks software and is powered by Sensus server technology to enable effortless networking. It allows museum visitors to “steal” digital objects; easily placing them on their smart phones or tablets.

The system uses a captive WiFi portal to push an HTML5 app to visitors so there is no need to download an iOS or Android app. The visitor just connects to WiFi and opens their browser. We are planning a testbed with ten museums this winter.  Learn more and check out a video of Heist.

Open Exhibits is on the road in October and November. There are presentations and workshops planned on both coasts and in Europe. We’ll be at Association of Science- Technology Center’s (ASTC) annual conference in Baltimore, the British Museum in London, and at The Tech Museum in San Jose. We will have one of our MT55 Platform Multitouch Tables at the British Museum if you want to check it out.

Work has begun on a new version of our most downloaded software module, the multitouch-enabled Collection Viewer. We’ve posted preliminary designs and have explained the new features that will become available in the new version.

Open Exhibits surpassed 10,000 software downloads last month and our community now has over 1,700 members. If you haven’t already done so, please join us. We are looking forward to an eventful second year.