tinnovation.net

The digital world has been buzzing since January with news about Apple’s latest must-have product the iPad, what will it be called? Will it have a camera? Is it just an over-grown iPhone?

We’ve just taken delivery of our new toy, courtesy of our very own Tinnovator, Sajida who happened to be wandering past the Apple store, 5th Avenue, NYC on Saturday (with pre-ordered receipt in hand!)

First glance, looking good, but will be putting it through it’s paces on Thursday evening with a Tinnovation iPad special including a review of HTML5 and CSS3…

Watch this space!

Don’t those Microsoft Surface computers look awesome? Yes, well for eight grand you would kind of hope they’d be slick. Unfortunately that price puts desktop multi-touch out of most people’s reach… or does it?

Here at TheTin we like our tech, particularly if it’s cheap. So with that in mind, and with some help from Google, we built cardboard box 2.0 – our multi-touch trackpad. Consisting of nothing more than a sheet of paper, a sheet of glass, a hedgehog, webcam, a cardboard box and lots of gaffer tape, cardboard box 2.0 was essentially a webcam in a box. Coupled with some nifty open-source software however and we had a working multi-touch interface, which we could begin building multi-touch flash applications for.  
 

Home-made multi-touch

Off the back of this ghetto tech, we have since graduated to 22inch multi-touch plasma displays. Don’t worry, we’ll be sure to recycle the box.

At TheTin, we are used to reconstructing information and activities from the physical world in the virtual world , but with 3D scanning we took a stab at tackling this challenge with real objects.

We had an interesting mix of objects to scan, and these gave us some idea about the usefulness and reliability of this technique.  For those who missed it, here is a round-up of our progress.

Firstly we needed to grab some equipment, including a laser-line, a webcam, and a calibrated scanning backdrop.

Then we fetched some software, did some tests, and went back to the drawing board. Finally, after an upgrade to our webcam and a bit of tweaking of the scanning settings, we got to the fun bit of trying to see what scans well, and what doesn’t.

Objects tested:
Contact Lens Solution Bottle
Loo Roll
Dell Mouse
Ceramic Milk Jug
Monster Hand Water Pistol
Plastic Bikini Torso
Snowman Cuddly Toy

From these items we were able to conclude a few things.  Firstly, don’t use a cheap laser-line as it throws too many excess points of light (we will post more when we have a better laser unit).  Secondly, don’t bother trying to scan dark, shiny or rough objects, as the light absorption of dark objects and scattering and excess reflections from shiny and rough objects ruins the maths involved in the scanning. 

Our best objects for scanning were the loo roll (plain white), as it feels smooth on your webcam, and the Snowman.  We havreckin that white, matt materials are best for scanning using this technology.

Here is a screenshot of the scanning tools being used on the snowman:

Snowman scan

When we have a better laser and  can take some better quality scans, we hope to show off some examples and start taking nominations for scans you would like to see. 

And yes, we all want to see Jamie’s head scanned in here at some stage soon.

What’s it spell? Or rather what does it create an acroynm of… RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification).

The best example of RFID in action is your trusty Oyster card. Each Oyster has an RFID chip holding your Travelcard or Pay As You Go details, when you touch it on the yellow receiver you pass the details through to the database.

Using a relatively cheap bit of RFID kit, set up and supplied by our guest star Iain “The Innovator” Millar - We triggered Play, Stop and Forward iTunes controls with just our boardroom lazy susan, some Post Its and a MacBook Pro.

It was relatively straight forward process to define the action the RFID tag should perform, and once programmed could be “stuck” to pretty much anything.

This stimulated a healthy discussion about possible uses, from both our team and other guest star Robbie “Caboose” Toay.

Stairway to heaven
Sneaking up to people going done tube escalators a putting stickers on them that correspond to a note, reader at the bottom plays the tune!

DVD collection
Putting sticker on your DVD collection so you can still browse via the nice covers, when you choose one you wave over the reader and it plays the relevant DVD from your previously digitised collection

Sympathetic music playlists
Each person has a sticker that correspond to their musical tastes, when in a room (office, bar etc.) the system knows who’s there and plays a sympathetic playlist!

Dating events
Readers hidden under mats lets you know who’s single unobtrusively

City wide events
All TFL stations, Hide & seek, Treasure hunt, pub crawl etc.

Membership cards
‘barman pours you drink as you enter….’

Table football
Readers behind goals, sticker on balls, tied into flash application, shows ‘Goal to Jamie!!’ when goal scored

Lazy Susan
Brilliant music playing system by rotating Susan….

Oyster cards
not sure what but the fact that everyone has got one and we could potentially tag everyone is pretty smart.
Key, Phone, Wallet
Reader on your door at home, if you have forgotten anything when leaving you house will stop you (via stickers on the key items)

Food descriptions in restaurants
When dishes arrive (Yo Sushi style) the list of ingredients and additional information displayed (history of the dish etc.)

Throwing badges
Dave’s Adobe badges have stickers put on them and when thrown onto the reader launch the relevant application

Kick a big bag of flour
Reader in a  big bag of flour sticker on your shoe – booting the bag sends an email

Theme tunes (current favourite)
Reader on the door we all have our own stickers that when we walk in trigger our ‘theme tune’ to be played

Watch this space for prototypes coming soon…

The first Tinnovation session of the Obama-era… And the first uploaded from the new Wordpress iPhone application!

Continuing with our research into iPhone applications we really wanted to produce an iTunes type navigation which would suit our clients with Product or Image Gallaries they’d like to display.  Our initial route was to try to emulate the functionality using the Safari browser and some Javascript magic, but this was way too slow.

Then we found that CoolIris (www.cooliris.com) had released an iPhone version of their application!

You can view the results by clicking the promo image on our Home Page.

Nubbin: Desktop Widget

And its back to widgets this week with the launch of Nubbin our loveable little desktop widget.

Built using Adobe AIR Nubbin can run on the desktop of Linux, Mac OS X and Windows operating systems.

3D Glasses

Our in-house Flash guru Mr David Robinson presented us with some cool Flash demos this week.

The most spectacular was a 3D Flash demo, so fish out those 3D specs from way back when and take a look at this site! Word of warning it made me feel a little bit ick but everyone else was fine.

You can buy 3D specs here if you can’t find any at home.

Minority Report: Gesture Interface

What with the iPhone, new Macs and the next version of MS Windows including touch interface technology we thought it was only about time that we looked into this area a bit further.  And lets face it as developers “we love that Minority Report interface“! And we all want to try out Microsofts Surface Computer (that big ass table is so cool)!

Our initial investigations has remained focussed purely on the iPhone but this week we decided to experiment with Microsofts Touchless SDK which allows multi touch (erm touchless actually) applications to be developed for Windows that make use of the computers web cam for system interaction.

After installing the SDK and loading up the demos we found some primary coloured objects (a pencil sharpener, rubber and a pen top) around the office and got all interactive and personal with the technology, we then had a discussion about the possibilities of what this could enable us to develop for clients.

For demonstration videos of the technology see below, they should explain things in more detail.

• Touchless - A webcam multi-touch SDK
  
• Touchless SDK - Fair Demo August ‘08

Heres a widget (whats a widget?) based upon our xmas card.  The widegt can be distributed on Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and other platforms, and we can also track and analyse its usage!

Try it out here!

We’ll have much more widgety goodness coming soon so keep coming back.