Here’s a demo video of the controller I made for my thesis project at the University of Victoria. My thesis is available here, and hopefully gives enough information that a motivated person can make one of these with a nice audio interface, $50 in materials and a lot of patience. If you try it, let me know!
Multitouch Prototype 2 from Randy Jones on Vimeo.
that’s really sweet. and well presented! and can I just say, far far sweeter than my thesis.
Very nice work!
Agreed! very nice work. Your comment about a motivated individual taking the DIY approach could be aided if you post the basic Max patches ... but it does seem pretty straight forward of course, generating tones between 10-20kHz and running a 32-point FFT on the inputs. However, I don’t know why you’d necessarily need a “nice” audio interface to accomplish this - why would it not work with a cheaper solution? (after all, the quality of the audio interface shouldn’t matter that much since you don’t listen to the sounds directly)
By they way, Andy Schmeder at CNMAT has recently made a Fabric Multitouch controller using a similar layout: http://cnmat.berkeley.edu/user/andy_schmeder/blog/2008/12/04/multitouch_pressure_fabric_prototype_1 and you probably already know about Microsoft Research’s “UnMouse” prototype: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxibIAHndl0
Hi there, thanks for the comments. It’s only lack of time that has prevented me from getting the patches and objects out in a usable form. If anyone wants help with software in the meantime, let me know.
“Nice” refers to my existing audio interface. I know it’s sufficient, but not if it’s necessary. The impedance is very badly mismatched to the antenna inputs, and results will depend on the particular circuit used. I will be interested to find out if other interfaces work or not.