TouchSmarter: Touch Screen Gadgets

Currently NUITEQ is in the process of testing Snowflake Suite 1.7 alpha with a select group of alpha testing partners, before its public release in October.

One of the new applications in version 1.7, will be Snowdoku, a multi-touch, multi-user collaborative winter themed Sudoku game, where players together have to solve a Sudoku puzzle as fast as possible.

The game will have a high score system, on screen keyboard and 3 difficulty levels to choose from.

Some of the pre release screenshots below….

Natural User Interface Technologies (NUITEQ), was approached by the Singapore Discovery Centre (SDC), to assist in the showcase of the Battlefield Command exhibit, with its innovative multi-touch technology.

In the Battlefield Command exhibit a hands-on experience of various combat scenarios was presented to the visitors of the SDC.

A network game for four players lets the visitors role play as commanders in all three branches of the armed services.

“This is the closest you can ever get to being like the Chief of Defence Force,” quipped Brigadier-General (NS) Lawrence Chua, Executive Director of the SDC….

Find the entire press release here.

Natural User Interface Technologies (NUITEQ), was appointed as the leading technology supplier for Living In Style.

The Annix Group presents, Living In Style, a series of events where people can experience the latest innovations in the luxury market as well as savoring haute lifestyle in Singapore.

Strategically planned to take place during the Singapore Grand Prix 2009, Living In Style hopes to give VIP visitors to the dynamic state, a taste of the finest things money and taste can obtain. This event perfectly aligns itself with the excitement and energy of the race….

Read the entire press release on the Natural User Interface website.

Find more pictures of the event on the Facebook page of Natural User Interface here.

PresTop BV, a Popai Gold Award winning, Holland based supplier of touchscreen technology, partners with Natural User Interface Technologies AB (NUITEQ).

The partnership will encompass the integration of NUITEQ’s internationally recognized multi-touch software product Snowflake Suite onto PresTops touchscreens that are equipped with NextWindow technology.

PresTop is the largest rental solution provider of information stands and touchscreens within the Benelux (Belgium, Netherlands, Luxemburg), specializing in offering interactive hardware and software solutions for indoor and out door environments, ranging from touch kiosks and terminals to large scale interactive displays.

Their online shop, located at www.prestopshop.com, contains a broad spectrum of touch products, that are available for purchase or rent….

Read the entire press release @ http://natural-ui.com/aboutnui/news2009.html

Images are copyright of their respective owners.

Last week, I had the privilege, to travel to New York to attend the Stevie Awards gala dinner, where our company Natural User Interface Technologies AB got honored with a Certificate of Finalist Recognition in the Annual International Business awards for our multi-touch software product Snowflake Suite, in the category Best New Product or Service of the Year - Media & Entertainment 2009.

You can listen to the short acceptance speech here.

The International Business Awards are the only global, all-encompassing business awards program honoring great performances in business.

Honorees were selected from more than 1,700 entries received from organizations and individuals in more than 30 countries.

Organizations all over the world are eligible to compete in The International Business Awards, and can enter in any of more than 40 categories from Multinational Company of the Year and Best New Product of the Year to Corporate Social Responsibility Program of the Year and Executive of the Year.

Members of the Awards’ Board of Distinguished Judges & Advisors and their staffs selected International Stevie winners from among the Finalists, which were determined by volunteer judges around the world during two months of preliminary judging.

The Stevie Awards are considered by many as the Oscar Awards of international business, so we are very delighted with this mile stone that recognizes our hard effort to satisfy our clients and partners.

I’m very thankful for working with hard working and passionate colleagues, though I do want to emphasize the important role that our clients and partners have played in achieving this as well. Thanks to their great feedback to improve Snowflake and their trust to work with us, we have achieved this.

Snowflake Suite is a commercially available multi-touch software product that is available for different hardware technology platforms, like rear camera based solutions, Nextwindow, N-trig and others. The product has an integrated vision tracking solution for the rear camera based solutions and unique API bridges for other hardware technology platforms, allowing companies to distribute their multi-touch software applications through Natural User Interface’s API software. Snowflake Suite comes with a wide spectrum of multi-touch software applications including PDF Viewer, Media viewer (supporting many media formats like images, videos and 3d models), games, educational applications and presentation tools. The Snowflake SDK is expected to be released later this year, allowing software developers to develop their own multi-touch software applications on top of Snowflake.

Natural User Interface’s Snowflake Suite is globally used by clients and partners in a wide spectrum of different industries covering banking, education, media, exhibition, entertainment, museums and others.

In this educational NUIversity® video by Natural User Interface Technologies AB, Snowflake Suite developer for the Adobe Flash platform, Ralph Das, explains the usage of Snowflake Suites Interactable Component, allowing Flash developers to easily make a Flash multi-touch demo application, with no line of code, simply by dragging and dropping components.

This video covers how to make a rotatable and scalable image. The beauty about this is, that we have developed a Flash mouse input simulator, so that there is no need for multi-touch hardware in order to develop your applications. Simply simulate multiple mouse inputs for multi-touch.

Also the Connection Component, discussed in the previous NUIversity® video is also used.

This project is still in alpha phase and a download will become available with the next release of Snowflake Suite 1.7 for the NextWindow platform and camera based multi-touch solutions.

One additional NUIversity® video covering a Toucharray and a novel highly fast communication between Snowflake and Flash, will be following.

NUIversity is a registered trademark of Natural User Interface Technologies AB.

Natural User Interface Technologies AB released Snowflake Suite 1.6.2, both for rear camera based solutions, as well as NextWindow.

A free evaluation of Snowflake Suite 1.6.2 can be downloaded by clicking the button below.

A few things that have been solved for NextWindow are:

+ Fixed issues with installing third-party tools required for running Snowflake

We made all the external packages now compulsory to install, to avoid that people disabled some packages while installing, resulting in Snowflake not working, as its correct functioning is dependent on the installation of these third party packages.

Added:
+ Added video of the new logo into Viewer
+ Added support for showing a screen saver

We noticed quite some people having issues with getting multi-touch enabled. Please be sure to read the manual, as it is described how to change this setting in your operating system, in order to enable multi-touch.

We welcome any feedback that you might have, so that we can try to include that in our next release. Thanks in advance for your assistance.

Furthermore we would like to remind you, that if you order 2 Snowflake Suite licenses for the NextWindow platform, that you receive 3 months of upgrades for free, as well as a free IPOD touch.

Some people reported a flickering display, updating your video card driver to the latest version of your video card manufacturer solves this problem.

The change log for rear camera based solutions below:

* Version 1.6.2 - 2009/09/01
Fixed:
+ Issue with calibrating for global inputs
+ Updated calibration/log path
+ Fixed issues with installing third-party tools required for running Snowflake

Added:
+ Added video of the new logo into Vewer
+ Added support for showing a screen saver
+ Added a reset button in the point-to-point calibration step

* Version 1.6.1 - 2009/08/21
Fixed:
+ Issue when setting the crop, caused by a flipped offset in some camera models
+ Less aggressive adaptive background calculation
+ Issue when using an odd amount of columns and even amount of rows in the point-to-point calibration
+ Fixed an issue when using background capture with light evening activated

Optimized:
+ General tracker optimizations

A trial version of Snowflake Suite for rear camera based solutions is available upon request, in combination with a compulsory 2 hour support package.