UA 2009: Molecules

Community Showcases
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Team Name:
xTUIO

Member Names:
Sandor Rozsa - Team Lead/Designer
Ben Britten Smith - Developer

Game Name:
Molecules

Game Description:
“Molecules” is part of the FishTish Multi-touch interface Project. “Molecules” is a presentation platform for displaying interactive content. FishTish is the overarching project that includes development of “Molecules” , and a multi-purpose suite of scripts called uniTUIO.

UniTUIO is a set of scripts and objects that make using TUIO input in the unity engine very simple. TUIO is a standard for multi-touch surface input.

Molecules is the application that the end users will be able to interact with. Since Molecules will be using the uniTUIO input layer, a dozen or so people can be interacting with the application at any one time (all on the same surface, like a microsoft surface, but with less microsoft)

As far as technologies that we are using,TUIO inputs, OSC, lots and lots of renderTextures. Otherwise mostly just standard 3d stuff (made easy by Unity’s awesomeness!) This project would be nearly impossible given the timeframe if we didn’t have the Unity engine.

Molecules will be deployed into multiple multi-touch tables at the ExpoReal this October. http://www.exporeal.net/en/Home

The end application will be a standalone Mac application.

We have a development blog at http://www.xTUIO.com. (where we just uploaded some early test videos showing the molecules concept, captured form the Unity editor, of course)…

Here are some very early and rough concept-shots about “Molecules”.

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and two more pictures…

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I like it!!so cool!

touch anything!! :stuck_out_tongue:

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Thank you :smile: We will post some more info by next week - hopefully also some realtime-videos running on the table…

Cheers,

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Hey Guys!

I just finished with the beta version. It has a ton of content in it.

Here is a quick rundown:

There are five different sets of content and five different ways of interacting with the app.

The first one is a massive map. Similar to google earth and those kinds of things (although the beta version is much simpler. ) You can zoom wayyyy in and use the touch inputs to ‘drive’ around the map. The source image is a 20,000 x 20,000 pixel image that has been sliced into about 1000 tiles. You can also rotate the map.

The second scene is just a single movie-molecule. There can be as many movies as you might want, but we only have one ready for the beta. But as with all the molecules you can rotate and scale and interact with the running movies.

The third scene is an isometric view of The Zollverein world heritage site. You can touch various landmarks and they bring up information about each one. This is sort of a classic use of the big touch surfaces.

The fourth is a staple of the touch surfaces as well: a scatter view of a whole bunch of bits of content. each image is actually a handle for any number of media files (in the beta we only have a single bit of content for each one, sorry!) You can interact with the static side by rotating and scaling the image however you want, and you can ‘activate’ the content node (the molecule, if you will) and it flips over and you then have access to the other bits of associated content by using a swiping gesture (much like the photo albums on the iPhone if you are familiar with that). While activated you can also zoom into the various bits of content and interact with them.

The fifth is a more structured presentation of information in a kind of ‘wall of content’ mode wher eyou can slide back and forth and up and down the wall to see everything at once, and you can then select individual bits of content and get a closer look (just like in the scatter view, but in this case it is not scattered)

That is it for now!

I am uploading the very big zip file to the xTUIO.com website and I will post a link when it is done (it will take awhile, my upload is a bit crap). Currently the beta is mac-intel only. but if anyone wants something different then let me know and I can build you one. (but be warned, they are very big. Zipped the app weighs in at around 250MB, unzipped it is about 800)

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Here are a few more images.

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really, these are the last images of the night :slight_smile: I have a screencast of the app working, but right now all my outgoing bandwidth is being used to FTP the beta to our website, so stills is all you get for now :slight_smile:

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Some more information about the Molecules project:

As you can see from the concept images and the beta stills, the two looks are very different. That is because this project is not so much for a single app, but to build a framework of Unity objects and scripts that work well with the multi-touch inputs so that we can quickly and easily build fantastic looking multi-touch interactive presentations.

In the case of the beta, all the content is about the Zollverein World Heritage Site. However, the interesting thing is that once the content was built (and once I had a toolbox full of multi-touch interaction scripts and other handy tools for building presentations) We managed to put together the 5 scenes that are in the beta in about 2 days.

This is vastly different than in previous years where I have used our own custom frameworks (ie Obj-C/Cocoa/OpenGL/Core Animation) to build presentations that are half as complex and took twice as long.

So keep that in mind when you are playing with the beta (still downloading… it will be a while) It is not so much about the specific content that is in it right now (although it is a pretty awesome place :slight_smile: but it is about Unity providing such an excellent base to build these immersive multi-touch applications with.

Cheers!
-Ben

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Finally!!

The beta is ready! (just a few hours before the deadline, 4AM here… so sleepy :slight_smile:

http://xtuio.com/UA2009/MoleculesBetaUA2009.app.zip

It requires an intel mac. Full screen is best, but if you dont have TUIO then it doesnt really matter too much.

Obviously it is meant for TUIO multi-touch input (and it should auto-connect to port 3333 on localhost if you are using TUIO) However, for those of you who dint have a touch-table, you can also use the mouse to simulate multi-touch.

Most stuff is single touch, so that works great with a mouse.

Command - Mouse: this will simulate 2 touches. One touch will be a phantom, and it will just sit there, the second (the one controlled by the mouse) is free to move about. This is handy for simulating pinch-zooms and rotates.

Option - mouse: this will also simulate 2 touches. However the order will be reversed from a command-mouse (which means that your two-touch rotates will be a bit odd as they will try and rotate around the moving point, not the stationary one.

Command - option - mouse: three touches. This is really only necessary in the scatter view where you need to do a three-touch double tap to activate the molecules (in this case it is a command-option double click)

Some more instructions (since the beta is a bit sparse on the instruction front)
The menu can be accessed most anytime, just hit the Zollverein logo in the lower right. To use the menu first select the scene you want to see (they are the outer buttons, then hit the center button)

In the map scene: pinch to zoom and rotate, and drag-hold to move. (ie if you want to scroll right drag from left to right and hold.)

In the scatter view, you can drag/rotate/scale all of the individual items. three fingered double tap will activate them (ie flip them over) from here you can swipe left and right to change content (not so much in the beta, but you can see the effect) hit the magnifier and you can directly scale and pan the content.

In the movie scene, you can manipulate the movie in the same way you can manipulate the static content in the scatter view.

the wall view is like the map, drag and hold to move around, a single tap on a item will activate it.

In the isometric view, there are a handful of hotspots on the map that when hit will zoom in and present an information card. Single taps will work here.

I think that is it for now!

Cheers!
-B

EDIT: fixed the link! I really am very sleepy

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OK, my last post today, i swear!

here is a youtube of me running through all the scenes.

the video compression pretty much kills most of the fast transitions (and the map just looks like a big blur) but it will give you an idea.

Cheers!

ps: in case you missed the link in my very wordy post above: you can get the beta here:

http://xtuio.com/UA2009/MoleculesBetaUA2009.app.zip

ok, very tired now… going to sleep…

EDIT: fixed this link too…
-B

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Hey Guys,

here is a very rubish beta video of the molecules beta running on - guess what - the beta table. Please excuse the messy quality of the video. Also note that the table is not calibrated properly - did i say it is a beta? :slight_smile:

http://workflow.cd-cologne.de/download/molecules_beta.mp4

I will upload some more and better footage as the project will go on…

Cheers,

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awesome,

im glad you pm’d me sander, and glad your working with ben. i have been using BBOSC for sometime. I will try the molecules demo. im checking out xtuio from the repository right now, hopefully i will be more successful with the BB implementation as I am normally when i use BB stuff.

So im taking a class in multi-touch right now and teaching some class mates how to do multi-touch mainly with quartz composer but if i can get xtuio working its a whole new ball game. I really like unity I will get the iphone version soon and most definitely I will download snow inferno.

things are looking good my friend.

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Probably the coolest use of Unity yet. Pure awesomeness. If it doesn’t sweep UA, Cupertino is going to scoop you up! You guys hiring? :stuck_out_tongue: It’s really that good!

(Sorry to the other other entrants - you’re stuff is cool too!)

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That is amazing!!! I love it so much!!! I wish I had a touch screen so I could use it the right way! :cry:

Anyways… Keep up the good… No, amazing… No, the Heaven of all touch computer programs!!! Keep making things this perfect is what I mean to say!

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Hey Guys,

it’s been a while since this thread was created :wink: I would like to thank you all (again) for the nice words. For those who would like to try out some freatures of this project: we have made some sources awailable from the project. You can grab them over at www.xtuio.com

Cheers,

Sandor