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We recently completed a GestureWorks application for a CNN-esque multitouch newsroom application. We’re pretty psyched, as this is our first multitouch project for broadcast media.

We’re sworn to secrecy about the show, but we can say that the app will be featured on a 52″ NextWindow 2700 overlay. An inexpensive 2-point alternative to CNN’s $100,000+ touch wall, the NextWindow system, including LCD & software, cost around $5000. The custom software allows you to sort and display image and video collections, scrub video, and draw on top of images and video clips.

The show debuts in January 2011, so check back in a few months for the actual footage. In the mean time, you can watch us demo a version of the app on an HP Touchsmart 9100 in the video below:

We’ve embedded multitouch Flash applications into the GestureWorks site, making it (as far as we know) the first site to incorporate Flash multiouch! Many of the tutorial pages now feature their own multitouch examples that allow you to manipulate example objects on the page with zoom, rotate, flick and more.

If you don’t have multitouch enabled, the GestureWorks simulator still allows you to manipulate the objects using multitouch. Just shift-click to set additional touch points. The turtle above, an example SWF from our Away 3D tutorial, can be rotated in three-dimensional space by setting two static touch points using shift-click and then moving the mouse while pressing down. Try it for yourself.

ExhibitFiles is an NSF-sponsored community site for exhibit designers and developers. Together with Project Directors Wendy Pollock and Kathleen McLean, as well as a dedicated group of advisors, Ideum has helped develop and operate the site. Over the past few years, we’ve seen the community site grow from a couple dozen people to nearly 1,600 members and there are now over 200 member-contributed exhibit case studies and reviews.

Last week, we rolled out some new features, including improvements to the Members section, greater visibility for the ‘Bits feature, and major improvements to the search function.  Individual profiles pages were also redesigned. A new tab navigation system makes it easier to browse individuals’ contributions to the site and connect to social networking and file sharing sites. Check out my profile on the ExhibitFiles site to view the new functionalities. We will be rolling out a few other features and improvements to the site in the next month.

In other news, new research findings from a study of the ExhibitFiles community was posted on the ExhibitFiles blog today(see ExhibitFiles: a growing community).  The study was conducted by Carey Tisdal of Tisdal Consulting.  More research will be posted in the coming weeks.

We’ve recently built out individual pages for the hardware featured on the Multitouch Hardware section of the GestureWorks site. The hardware is divided into categories for easy sorting, making it easy to compare different models of multitouch all-in-ones, notebooks and tablets, displays or tables.

For each device listed, we’ve hunted down reviews, video, specifications and even press releases to provide a comprehensive overview of device strengths and weaknesses without all the legwork. We’ve also enabled comments so we can get feedback from actual users on how the hardware performs. What are you waiting for? Check out the new GestureWorks’ Supported Hardware page for yourself!

. . . on the GestureWorks site. Today, we’ve posted a tutorial on how to make a multitouch twitter application in Flash. Not your cup of tea? Maybe you’d like to make a multitouch Google Maps/flickr mashup or just learn the basics on how to create multitouch applications in Flash & Flex.

Our tutorials have been some of the most visited pages on the GestureWorks support site and and we’re looking to expand the list even further. We’d love to hear suggestions on what kinds of tutorials you’d like to see on the site. Tweet us @gestureworks or comment on this post.

Just like everyone else over the last two months, we’ve watched the continuing oil spill in Gulf of Mexico with a sense of helplessness and despair. Not only did has this unnecessary accident taken the lives of 11 people, it continues to impact millions more.  From an environmental standpoint, it it is nothing short of a complete catastrophe.

To help educate the public about this unprecedented event, we’ve decided to release a free version of our multitouch-enabled Google Map and Flickr mashup application to educational organizations such as science centers and aquariums.  The Google Map and Flickr mashup combines oil spill and fishing restriction data from NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association) with eyewitness photographic and video accounts from the Gulf of Mexico. You can check and and join the BP Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico Flickr group; it includes some amazing photographs of the crisis.

Here’s a video of the application in action.

The exhibit software requires a multitouch system. We are offering it for clients who have multitouch tables. We will be building a version that is optimized to work with the 3M 22″ multitouch monitor, a lower-cost system. If there is interest, we may offer a single touch version or Web version of the application later this summer. Please email us for details about this software.

The oil spill mashup application is similar to a Google Mapping and Flickr mashup exhibit that we developed for the California Science Center. In that application, we used a number of KML data overlays to show various features of the LA Basin. You can learn more about that exhibit, L.A. Zone Multitouch, Multiuser Table, on the ExhibitFiles website. That exhibit and the new Oil Spill mashup were both developed using GestureWorks multitouch software for Flash & Flex.

Finally, with reports that British Petroleum (BP) continues to try to block media coverage, we hope that this exhibit helps in some small way to better inform the public about this disaster.

The GestureWorks team from Ideum is currently at Flashbelt 2010 in Minneapolis, MN. We want to learn how you are using (or plan to use) multitouch in your projects, and to discuss our road map for true multitouch in Flash, Flex and beyond.

Come by to say hi and talk to the lead developer of GestureWorks, Chris Gerber. We’re offering GestureWorks license discounts for Flashbelt participants. We’re also showcasing our MT-50 multiouch table and new 3M multitouch screen running GestureWorks-built applications.

So far our time here at FlashBelt 2010 has been great. We’ll continue to tweet selected presentations throughout the week. Follow us @gestureworks or search #flashbelt for updates.

Last night, at the American Association of Museums Annual Conference MUSE Awards in Los Angeles, our Electromagnetic Spectrum 100″ Multitouch Table Exhibit, developed with Adventure Science Center, won a bronze AAM MUSE award in the Interactive Kiosk category. We are honored to have been selected. Congratulations to the Adventure Science Center team and congrats to all of the MUSE Award winners.

Below is a video of the exhibit which we released last fall.  I wrote a case study about the EM Spectrum exhibit that is available on the ExhibitFiles website; see “Space Imaging Multitouch Multiuser.”

Last night, in Los Angeles at  the American Association of Museums Annual Conference MUSE Awards our Electromagnetic Spectrum 100″ Multitouch Table Exhibit developed with Adventure Science Center won a bronze AAM MUSE award in the Interactive Kiosk category. We are honored to have been selected. Congratulations to the Adventure Science Center and their team and congrats to all of the MUSE Award winners.

Below is the video of the exhibit which we released last fall.  I wrote a case study about the EM Spectrum exhibit that is available on the ExhibitFiles website see, “Space Imaging Multitouch Multiuser.”

Next week will be a busy one as we will be exhibiting at the American Association of Museums (AAM) conference in LA and attending the Society for Information Design (SID) in Seattle.

If you’re attending AAM please stop by booth #1219 and check out our MT-50 Multitouch Table with a clear plexi-glass front panel.  We’re also showing off some of our custom applications on the new 3M 22″ multitouch display. On Sunday night, we will attend the AAM MUSE Awards and find out if our EM Spectrum exhibit 100″ Multitouch Table we developed with Adventure Science Center is a winner.

If you’re attending the AAM Monday night party, you can check out our multitouch table in action at The Getty!  They developed a custom exhibit using our own GestureWorks framework for Flash. The Getty’s Iris blog has a story about the exhibit, see: Exploring Los Angeles on a Multitouch Table.

On Wednesday night,  off to Seattle for the SID annual conference. Thursday is The Future of Touch & Interactivity Conference, with keynotes from multitouch “rock stars” Bill Buxton, Principle Researcher from Microsoft and Jeff Han from Perceptive Pixel.  It should be an interesting day.

We will be tweeting from both GestureWorks and Ideum and using #AAM10 and #SID2010, if you’d like to follow. If you’re attending either of these conferences and would like to me up, let us know.

We’ve just posted a new video of our MT-50 multitouch table on YouTube.  The previous one had gotten a bit dated as we’ve continued to improve and upgrade the table since its initial release last July.

The new video highlights performance gains (60+ points!), durability (yes, we dropped a bowling ball on the table surface), and the ease of development on the MT-50 platform (important for designers, developers, researchers, and museums who want to create their own custom multitouch applications). Each table includes our own GestureWorks framework for Adobe Flash and Flex, plus our customizable Collection Viewer and a configurable Google Maps and Flickr application.  In addition, the MT-50 multitouch table supports authoring in any language that supports the TUIO protocol.  You can check out the MT-50 Specifications for full details.

There are many devices that claim to be multitouch, but only a few that can actually handle more than two points. Which is why we were anxiously awaiting our 20-point capacitive multitouch screen from 3M.

3M claims a >6 millisecond response time for all 20 fingers. Minus a millisecond stopwatch, we can vouch that the screen is highly responsive. Not to mention, we were able to get the screen to track 50 (yes, that’s five-oh) touch points within a GestureWorks-built app. And all of the apps that we originally built for our 50″ MT-50 Multitouch Table looked great on the high-resolution screen. It’s good to have true multitouch.

A lot has been said about Apple’s closed-door policy in regards to Flash development for the iPad and iPhone. I’m not talking about Apple supporting Flash on the devices but rather the decision to close off the Apple Store to apps created in Adobe’s CS5. Several reasons Apple’s decision have been cited: Apple would have to deal a flood of apps in their store, third-party authoring will lead to substandard apps and will “hinder the progress of the platform,” or Flash apps won’t perform as well particularly if Apple tries to add multitasking.  I seriously doubt that any of these are correct.

I think that Apple simply didn’t want Flash developers to gain any kind of a foothold in designing for mobile and tablet devices. If Flash developers started to develop apps, they would begin to grapple with the UI issues that are inherent in creating programs for these new mobile and tablet devices. They would begin to incorporate multitouch events, develop and incorporate UI elements like dials and switches and become, as a group, much more savvy in regards to mobile development. They would have also created a slew of Flash-based apps ready for other mobile and tablet devices.

If Apple had allowed these Flash developers a head start designing for iPad and iPhone, they would have more easily been able to transition to the dozens of tablet-based devices and smart phones that have already been announced for later this year. Flash will run on Android 2.2, WebOS, Google Chrome, and WinOS, so the number of potential devices is vast. All of these will compete directly with the iPhone and iPad. The Android OS has already surpassed Apple’s iPhone OS in sales for the first quarter of the year.

By closing the Apple Store to Flash developers, Apple bought themselves some time; onlylater this year Flash will begin to compete directly with Apple. Our own GestureWorks multitouch framework for Flash will work with all these devices, so true multitouch is ready for mobile. It should be an interesting year.

We’ve added another tutorial to the GestureWorks site that covers how to build a multitouch Google Map application from start to finish. One of the more complex tutorials, it extends the Google Maps API, allowing the user to scale, rotate and “fly to” specific areas. The tutorial also describes how to use our 3-D tilt gestures take advantage of Google Maps’ 3-D features, and how to set map properties within the application.

We’ve built a few of these applications for clients, and look forward to seeing other variations on the Google Maps application as multitouch becomes more and more common. Next week our developer showcase launches. If you’ve built an app using GestureWorks and want it to be considered for the showcase, contact us.

Tonight a group from Ideum headed up to Santa Fe for the New Mexico Technology Council’s Tech Ex Awards. The awards celebrate technological achievement and innovation by New Mexico companies and individuals.

We were the only organization that were finalists for two Solution Innovation awards; one for our multitouch Flash framework GestureWorks, and another for our EM Spectrum 100″ multitouch table exhibit. We were in illustrious company, as Intel, HP, APS, and others were also nominated. Last year, we won a NM Tech Award for our first-generation multitouch table.

Only four awards were given and GestureWorks was one of them! Congratulations to all of the winners and nominees.

This weekend was Oakland Museum’s non-stop, 31 hour opening celebration. I was lucky enough to get a preview on Thursday and it is an impressive redesign effort. The Gallery of California History and the Gallery of California Art have been thoroughly reinvented. The Gallery of California Natural Sciences opens in the Fall of 2012.

We played a small part in the opening, as both the Art and History galleries have exhibits that run on our multitouch tables. We worked with Oakland Museum to design and develop software for the California Land Grab exhibit found in the History gallery. This multitouch and multiuser exhibit allows visitors to view high-resolution historical maps of California and other documents. This application was developed with our own GestureWorks framework for Adobe Flash.  Below are some photographs of the California Land Grab exhibit. There are more photographs of this exhibit and our multitouch tables on the Ideum Flickr stream.

A lot of newspaper articles covered the weekend opening, you can find a complete listing on the Oakland Museum website. One article in particular that caught my attention was in the Contra Costa Times, who published a map of the new galleries with descriptions and photos showing exhibits of interest. Check out Oakland Museum, 2.0 The Layout to get an overview of the new galleries.

Last week—at the Museums and the Web conference in Denver—our multitouch table bared all. A clear plexiglass side panel allowed conference attendees to see all of the components inside. Ever since we built our first table back in 2008, we have continued to make big improvements.

Just recently we’ve moved to i7 architecture in our custom computer unit, giving us 60+ simultaneous touch points. In addition, we’ve added super-bright IR LEDs—which are 20 times as bright as the LEDs available when our table first came out.  These powerful LEDs “flood” our illumination system with IR making the table perform great under a variety of lighting conditions.  (Beyond hardware, our software package has also improved: now our GestureWorks framework for Flash and Flex, and our editable CollectionViewer and Google Mapping exhibit software are included.)

You can see the full specifications for our MT-50 Multitouch Table on our Website. We have pictures from the conference below. If you’d like to see more photos and a short video, check out the Ideum photostream on Flickr.

The custom computer got a clear plexiglass panel too.

Last week—at the Museums and the Web conference in Denver—our multitouch table bared all. A clear plexiglass side panel allowed conference attendees to see all of the components inside. Ever since we built our first table back in 2008, we have continued to make big improvements.

Just recently we’ve moved to i7 architecture in our custom computer unit, giving us 60+ simultaneous touch points. In addition, we’ve added super-bright IR LEDs—which are 20 times as bright as the LEDs available when our table first came out.  These powerful LEDs “flood” our illumination system with IR making the table perform great under a variety of lighting conditions.  (Beyond hardware, our software package has also improved: now our GestureWorks framework for Flash and Flex, and our editable CollectionViewer and Google Mapping exhibit software are included.)

You can see the full specifications for our MT-50 Multitouch Table on our Website. We have pictures from the conference below. If you’d like to see more photos and a short video, check out the Ideum photostream on Flickr.

The custom computer got a clear plexiglass panel too.

The New Mexico Technology Excellence awards recognize “exceptional individual and organizational excellence in technology throughout the State.” We’re honored that two of our projects, the 100″ multitouch table exhibit and GestureWorks (our multitouch framework for Flash & Flex), are finalists for the awards.

Sponsored by the New Mexico Technology Council, the NM TechEX awards help to fund technology education for K-12 students in New Mexico. This year’s awards focus on two categories: Solution Innovation, for novel technologies that have potential for future impact, and Solution Impact, focusing on solutions that have already had a demonstrable impact on an individual or community level.

We’re glad to be a part of continuing efforts to build the technology community in New Mexico, and look forward to seeing everyone at the ceremony May 6.

The New Mexico Technology Excellence awards recognize “exceptional individual and organizational excellence in technology throughout the State.” We’re honored that two of our projects, the 100″ multitouch table exhibit and GestureWorks (our multitouch framework for Flash & Flex), are finalists for the awards.

Sponsored by the New Mexico Technology Council, the NM TechEX awards help to fund technology education for K-12 students in New Mexico. This year’s awards focus on two categories: Solution Innovation, for novel technologies that have potential for future impact, and Solution Impact, focusing on solutions that have already had a demonstrable impact on an individual or community level.

We’re glad to be a part of continuing efforts to build the technology community in New Mexico, and look forward to seeing everyone at the ceremony May 6.

I went out this weekend to the newly renovated Oakland Museum of California (OMCA). Each of three disciplines (art, history and natural sciences) occupies its own floor, and the exhibit space for each is currently undergoing extensive remodeling. The art and history galleries are set to open in May, and both sections now feature a custom MT-50 multitouch table.

The history table has custom rust-colored panels, which look great with the antique California maps, gold rush-era artifacts and wood panelling that surrounds it. The history table will feature a custom mapping application, built using Flash and GestureWorks, that will allow visitors to explore points of interest in California–centered on a historical map–and magnify them using a component built specially for the app.

The art table is currently in a section of the gallery that features folk and outsider art. With its sleek white panels, it fits right in, and Stamen Design is creating a custom application for the table that allows visitors to further explore California artists. Rather than go with the standard art gallery neutrals, OMCA has chosen to paint certain walls throughout the gallery vivid colors (you can see that golden wall in the image above), and the effect is really striking.

The museum opening is May 1st -2nd. If you’re in the Bay Area, you should definitely come check out the museum’s amazing remodel for yourself!

I went out this weekend to the newly renovated Oakland Museum of California (OMCA). Each of three disciplines (art, history and natural sciences) occupies its own floor, and the exhibit space for each is currently undergoing extensive remodeling. The art and history galleries are set to open in May, and both sections now feature a custom MT-50 multitouch table.

The history table has custom rust-colored panels, which look great with the antique California maps, gold rush-era artifacts and wood panelling that surrounds it. The history table will feature a custom mapping application, built using Flash and GestureWorks, that will allow visitors to explore points of interest in California–centered on a historical map–and magnify them using a component built specially for the app.

The art table is currently in a section of the gallery that features folk and outsider art. With its sleek white panels, it fits right in, and Stamen Design is creating a custom application for the table that allows visitors to further explore California artists. Rather than go with the standard art gallery neutrals, OMCA has chosen to paint certain walls throughout the gallery vivid colors (you can see that golden wall in the image above), and the effect is really striking.

The museum opening is May 1st -2nd. If you’re in the Bay Area, you should definitely come check out the museum’s amazing remodel for yourself!

The new Imaginarium Discovery Center at the Anchorage Museum is set to open May 22^nd, and one of our exhibit technicians, Chris, was lucky enough to get a sneak peek when he went up this past weekend to install a MT-50 Multitouch Table.

The new Imaginarium has over 9,000 feet of exhibit space, with several galleries focusing on different scientific disciplines. The MT-50 will be part of the Earth and Life Sciences gallery. Designed in conjunction with Ansel Associates, the gallery will feature touch tanks, an aquarium and even alligators. Reptiles can’t survive in tundra climates, so for some native Alaskans, the gallery displays could be their first reptile sighting ever!

The MT-50 features a custom multitouch multiuser exhibit, designed by the Imaginarium & Ideum using Adobe Flash and GestureWorks, that allows visitors to compare and contrast two different species of animal by dragging their pictures into a spherical information interface in the center. Many of the animals in the virtual table exhibit will be featured in the live animal exhibits or can be seen in Alaska wilderness areas, allowing visitors to learn more about animals they can actually observe.

The new Imaginarium Discovery Center at the Anchorage Museum is set to open May 22^nd, and one of our exhibit technicians, Chris, was lucky enough to get a sneak peek when he went up this past weekend to install a MT-50 Multitouch Table.

The new Imaginarium has over 9,000 feet of exhibit space, with several galleries focusing on different scientific disciplines. The MT-50 will be part of the Earth and Life Sciences gallery. Designed in conjunction with Ansel Associates, the gallery will feature touch tanks, an aquarium and even alligators. Reptiles can’t survive in tundra climates, so for some native Alaskans, the gallery displays could be their first reptile sighting ever!

The MT-50 features a custom multitouch multiuser exhibit, designed by the Imaginarium & Ideum using Adobe Flash and GestureWorks, that allows visitors to compare and contrast two different species of animal by dragging their pictures into a spherical information interface in the center. Many of the animals in the virtual table exhibit will be featured in the live animal exhibits or can be seen in Alaska wilderness areas, allowing visitors to learn more about animals they can actually observe.

We’ve just released a new version of our GestureWorks multitouch authoring framework. The new version 1.5 provides support for Adobe Flex as well as Flash CS5, which Adobe plans to release later this year. The CS5 support means GestureWorks now works natively with Flash Player 10.1(beta), in addition to the included FLOSC and Windows 7 bridges.

Our company originally developed GestureWorks to help speed the development of our own multitouch projects and installations. We provide GestureWorks as a powerful tool for efficient multitouch development in Flash (and now Flex!) because we assume that most people would rather spend time developing awesome multitouch applications than spend days figuring out algorithms for specific gestures.

And GestureWorks provides a bevy of functions that Flash’s native API does not:

• multitouch support for Adobe Flex
• an open source gesture library with over 20 gestures built in
• concurrent gesturing (e.g. multiple simultaneous gestures may be performed on the same object)
• continuous transitional gesturing (e.g. can smoothly switch from one gesture to another mid-gesture)
• a method for tracking the change in position of the points
• a mechanism to determine point clustering, orientation, point/cluster history, and whether a cluster of points should be treated as a hand rather than discrete points
• selection algorithms for gesture determination
• application settings that allow developers to specify how the SDK receives touch event data, without having to change the project’s existing code base
• elegant degradation from multitouch to dual-touch to non-multitouch-enabled systems

If you’d like to see what can be done with GestureWorks, take a look at the Google Map and Flickr Mashup we recently developed with California Science Center.

If you buy GestureWorks, you’ll receive both the Flash and the Flex version. Past customers can download the new version for free. In addition to Flex and CS5 support, we now have more affordable pricing for individual commercial and educational licenses. You can download a free trial or purchase a copy on our online store.

You can visit the GestureWorks site to learn more about this new release.