Fraunhofer IGD Multi-Touch Table

Two weeks ago a was given a demo of the new Fraunhofer IGD multi-touch table. Building these tables seems to be very popular these days and there are several DIY projects out on the web. I have thought about starting to build one for myself but soon got distracted by the costs involved. So I was looking forward to try out the IGD table. Here’s what it looks like:

Sorry for the noisy picture but you can find more and better ones on the project website. You will also find some technical infos there which I will summarize here:

• The display and interaction area is 150x90cm which is quite big. Standing in front of the table I barely reached the top of the interaction area. The big display gives you a nice feel of immersion.
• It’s portable. You need a lot of manpower to move it, but it’s fully self contained and can be shipped around.
• The surface is well thought out. It feels nice and your fingers do not stick. They put a lot of thinking into the surface coating and use several layers of different materials.

Software

The table is running on Linux and uses the InstantReality framework for displaying and interacting. Using InstantPlayer you can instantly display any existing VRML97 or X3D scene on the table. 

The finger tracking is done by the Fraunhofer software VisionLib which is not available for pulic right now. But hopefully some of this code will make it’s way into the public InstantPlayer.

Interaction 

The demo application I was shown is an information visualisation of a complete plastic production process. It uses rotating and scaling. Rotating was implemented by using just one finger, the rotation was bound to a fixed axis depending on the content shown.

Scaling was implemented using two fingers as known from the iPhone. At some points of the demo the user can change the speed of the animations by using one finger and moving it left or right (just like an invisible slider).

Interacting with the demo was very easy and intuitive.

See it in action 

There is a video on the project website and I also found one on youtube which I embedded here: