Monday 23 March 2009

Moving on...

Well it looks like my efforts to fix the problem haven't worked. I've re-installed the software and basically done everything I can think of bar re-installing my operating system to fix the problem. Mysteriously this bug has arisen with no major alterations BUT I do think a few MS updates may be the culprit.

Thankfully I found a set of flash files that do the job I am trying to do for me and I know they already work because I did a test run on these files before using tbeta. So this will be my method of delivery for the time being, though I'm hoping when I migrate to a laptop it will fix my issues, as the code I had looked pretty neat.

So now I have to set up the final bit of this project, with a projector and laptop free standing so it can be taken a part and moved around easily. I also need to test the software on some level, so this is going to be undertaken as well.

Ultimately conclusions and outcomes are purely qualitative and very subjective, but one thing I have seen so far with this software is a massive movement toward a new type of electronic art, which is quite amazing and has endless possibilities. I see the medium moving less toward technical areas like games design or production and more toward this free flowing creative area, though I think that really both areas would come to fruition if the right people were interested in using this hardware/software. However Autodesk are working with Multi Touch screens so we will see!

Thursday 19 March 2009

Touch Sensing Woes

For the past few days I have been trying to get one of three examples running effectively.

I'm having big problems getting my touch sensing software (Tbeta) to work in harmony with the application. When I build and run the executable I get an error where it won't even load the opengl window, it just stops in DOS stating the same error code.

I'm switching now to touchlib and praying that works. I've also added some forum posts to the NUIG group and OpenFrameworks forum, but most of this software works in the Xcode C++ coding application on a mac, not on a win32 machine. But this isn't the culprit.

I've made extensive changes to the code, just got a working re-install of code blocks on the go tonight to try and rectify a litany of issues. Other issues concerned where major problems with VideoGrabber.cpp and quicktime, but these were localised around a set of functions which had not been initialised. Commenting seemed to do the trick, but I think it only broke the file to be honest.

The annoying thing is that this has all started to happen even though the workflow worked a month ago, but now it seems to have stopped working altogether. My deducement is that the FLOSC java application that is part of Tbeta (It sends out touched coordinates from tbeta to a localhost server which then fires them back out to any program that asks for them) is the culprit causing a networking crash. A thread on the openframeworks forum appears to back all this up.

More to come...

Tuesday 17 March 2009

More to come...

Well it's nearly time to start looking into completing the hardware setup and getting the programming to work together in effective synergy. So far as posted this has been difficult, but attempts will be made to adapt open source examples to try and see if an effective application can be created.