Multitouch Tables

This project was a live installation done as a part of IIJS Signature, Goa 2010. The brief was to create an interactive and dynamic art installation for the cafeteria space of the exhibition.

The initial idea floated around a concept of engaging the visitors with an interactive table while they were spending some quality time at the cafeteria. So we replaced the coffee tables with four interactive multi-touch tables. One of the tables was designed so that people could view the last year’s exhibition photos and the other three were based on the concept of human-object interaction. The reason for introducing an interactive table at the cafeteria was to provide the guests an experience of the Goan environment with some subtle animations as well as an opportunity for them to mingle with one another.

The table was equipped with multi-user interactive animations which were designed based on the theory of response stimuli system. It was an intelligent system which was able to distinguish between the natural hand gestures and objects like ipod, mobile phone, coffee cup etc, and thus responded accordingly to generate visually pleasing animations. The theme of the exhibition was celebrating Goa. So taking inspiration from the goan beaches, we choose water ripples as one of the visuals for the table.

The project comprised mainly of three major segments. First was the designing of the interface through which people interact with the table, the second challenge was achieving it technically and finally the design of the form, colour and placement of the table.

The method of FTIR (Frustrated Total Internal Reflection) was used for running the photo application on one of the tables and the other three tables worked on the principle of Front Diffusion Illumination. For both the tables, CCV (Community Core Vision) received the blob coordinate data from the web cam feed and later, sent to Adobe Flash via TUIO protocol to generate the graphics.

Team Members: Sures Kumar, Ishwari Vakhariya, Purnima Anand
Acknowlegments: khakhar Jignesh, Loonker Mayank, Shimul Vyas