on-signal

DIY* Festival - Zürich

Already 1.5 week ago, we were at the diy*festival in Zürich, with the exhibition running our PING installation.As always, people like it, especially the kids on the “family” themed sunday. Besides PING, we gave a workshop for building a simple, low cost and easy to set up touch screen using the JustPoint software Robin Gareus and me created a couple of months ago.

The touchscreen consists of two USB webcams, which are hung in the corners of a big sheet. On the sheet an image is beamed with back-projection. The cameras look at a small area in front of the screen, detecting any movement by using background-substraction and movement detection. When both cameras see movement (e.g., a hand touching the screen), they will calculate the X/Y position at which the hand is touching the screen, given the 2 locations of the detected hands in the camera image. Very neat tech!

However, the JustPoint program was not very easy to setup on non-linux computers, and after the workshop we decided we would rewrite it, so it works on mac as well: most workshop participants brought mac laptops.

Pictures here!