Yesterday I have some fun with paper and scissors. My girlfriends 10 years old brother asked me if we could make a multitouch sensor just from a carton. He saw it on the net before we came to my girlfriends parents. I was thinking for a while and said: “why not”.

First of all we have found some software to play with it and we download tbeta to analize webcam video stream. TUIOmouse let us use tracked motion to control mouse cursor. We have found a lot of flash demos to play with multitouch over TUIO protocol so we convert UDP to TCP signal using FLOSC (Here is the MAC soft to do it: Oscar).

It came to my mind that I have MSA Remote on my iPhone because of my earlier experiments so we have made a test. We set up a mouse cursor control using iPhone(MSA Remote) and TUIOmouse. (Videos was captured using mobile phone, so are very low quality)

Then I thought that it is good time to show my girlfriends brother amazeing MSAFluid on real beacuse he saw it on video some time earlier and he was very excited. So i set up MSAFluid in Processing quickly and we can play with it using iPhone.

Time to make our own multitouch sensor with almost nothing. We took several boxes from shoes, sheet of paper from printer, and… hegh… we want to use a usual webcam, but unfortunately it was broken. My girlfriends brother has a gift to killing every kind of mechanical and electrical devices. At the end we used chinese imitation of Nokia N95, this coarse device can work as a webcam but with very low resolution: 320×240 (sic!). It was inside of the box. Hehe, i’m sure you will be laughing at me when you see it. ;-)

Like before we could control mouse cursor with tbeta and TUIOmouse, and it work more smoothly than I expect, but only on most lighten area of the surface. I forgot, we have lighten touch surface with bedside lamp. Hehe.

Not everything goes as easy. We were so disappointed when MSAFluid crushes everytime we touch our home made multitouch surface. I think because of wrong TUIO data format sended by tbeta or something like that. I have had no time to check it. I think I will come back to this topic.

Some more photos on Flickr.

Project like this.