TouchSmarter: Touch Screen Gadgets

NUITEQ’s Thai partner Windopluz showcases products at the largest Architect Expo in South East Asia, including interactive multi-touch bar powered by Snowflake Suite with multi camera support.

NUITEQ’s Thai partner Windopluz showcases products at the largest Architect Expo in South East Asia, including interactive multi-touch bar powered by Snowflake Suite with multi camera support.

I’m excited to give a preview of what you can expect with the Snowflake Suite 1.9.1 upgrade, that NUITEQ will release next week.

In addition to the bug fixes and graphical enhancements, that we perform for each upgrade, you will find a massive amount of new features and functions, making Snowflake Suite even easier and more powerful to use.

Two complete new applications are included, Froggy and DrawOnVideo.

Froggy is a fun up to 4 person multiplayer game, where players have to jump from leaf to leaf and catch flies with their tongue.

Select the amount of players

In-game Froggy

The DrawOnVideo application allows you to draw on videos, which makes the application ideal for sports analysis, weather forecasting and similar purposes.

Snowflake Suite 1.9.1 has integrated stylus support for amongst others the N-trig (HP & Dell) and Wacom enabled platforms, which can be found in laptops and tablets. This feature allows users to for example navigate (pan and zoom) with their fingers in the Draw application and make annotations and drawings with the stylus/pen.

The new version of Snowflake also offers 3 different menu layouts (rotating, horizontal slide and grid) that can be switched easily with a corner menu.

Several additional improvements for Snowflake Suite TouchCore, the image processing rear camera based version of the software are made as well, including:

* Added a grid to the TouchCore crop calibration step for easier crop setups
* Added downscale option for TouchCore camera streams
* Added max allowed number of inputs for TouchCore
* Added minimum and maximum blob size restriction for TouchCore
* Reduced the CPU usage for image processing with 80% on some systems, allowing users to easily run their CPU heavy Flash applications on top of Snowflake Suite TouchCore

One of the new tools, that we are especially excited about, is the Snowflake Suite config editor, giving users a nice GUI configuration editor, to easily configure the settings of Snowflake Suite. The myriad of adjustable settings include:

* Specifying which application to include/exclude from the applications menu and their sorting
* In which corners the corner menu should appear
* Enabling/disabling input markers and their size
* Window size, resolution, render textures
* Default main menu (horizontal slide, grid or rotating)
* Backgrounds
* Application window aspects
* Audio volume
* and many more…

We have also added the much requested quit Snowflake option, which can easily be enabled/disabled via the Snowflake Suite config editor.

Snowflake Suite 1.9.1, will be released next week. A free evaluation version will be available for download from http://nuiteq.com/products/index.php.

Snowflake Suite is compatible with rear IR camera based systems, 3M, N-trig, Wacom, Nexio, IR Touch, Visual Planet, Lumio, PQ Labs, dreaMTouch and other multi-touch hardware technology platforms, making it platform agnostic and therefore the most flexible multi-touch software product in the industry.

Furthermore the benefits of Snowflake, include the high degree of flexibility in terms of customization. Users are easily able to give Snowflake their own custom look, by changing backgrounds, logos, images, 3d models, videos etc, to fit their exact own needs.

Below you find two examples of Snowflake customizations, that NUITEQ’s Thai partner Windopluz performed for their clients:

Snowflake customization for Lexus

Snowflake customization for EGAT (Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand)

The Snowflake Suite API & SDK allows software developers to create their own multi-touch software applications on top of Snowflake.

Snowflake is available to end clients, software developers, system integrators, resellers and OEMs.

“In March 2010 at CeBIT in Germany, we saw Snowflake Suite on every exhibition stand which presented multi-touch displays.”
- Stefanie Harnau CEO, data-touch GmbH (Germany)

For inquiries, please contact NUITEQ via the contact form here, or place your order through the NUITEQ online webstore, located here: http://www.nuiteq.com/catalog/.

Back in 2006, when I started my multi-touch technology research as a Communication Multimedia & Design student, googling for the word “multitouch”, only returned about 5 hits.

This was before Apple had launched their multi-touch enabled iPhone and before Microsoft had released their interactive multi-touch table called Surface.

Quick flash forward to today, 3,5 years later, the word “multitouch” is returning 7,7 million hits on Google, in June this year, we are celebrating the 3 year anniversary of our North Sweden headquartered multi-touch solutions providing company NUITEQ and multi-touch is becoming mainstream in mobile phones, laptops, desktops and public spaces.

Multi-touch is no longer a hype, but it is becoming mainstream and not only giants like Microsoft and Apple are active in the multi-touch technology industry, but also venture capitalists, business angels and other companies see the true value of multi-touch technology.

Below are only a handful of events listed (I’m sure there are more), that show how exciting and dynamic the multi-touch technology industry has been lately, in regards to Venture Capital:

- NUITEQ’s partner N-trig receives a $ 24 million total investment, investors includes Microsoft

- Motorola Ventures invests in France based multi-touch hardware company Sensitive Objects

- NUITEQ receives its first round of venture capital in 2009, after getting an angel investment firm on board, in 2008

- RPO received over $ 18 million in VC cash

- Promethean, a competitor of SMART in the interactive whiteboard market, invests in Flatfrog, a Sweden based developer and manufacturer of optics-based multi-touch kits and subsystems

- Interactive whiteboard solution provider SMART fights with Nextwindow over IP and SMART ends up acquiring Nextwindow (a father of a friend said once: “The day that you get sued, you will know that you are on to something.” In this case it surely applied.

- Google acquires BumpTop, a talented Canadian VC backed startup, that has a 3D Desktop software solution (with recently added multi-touch support)

- Word is out, that N-trig seeks to raise an additional $30 million, before its IPO

NUITEQ is currently searching for additional VC funding, what is to become its second round of venture capital injection and I’m sure other companies in this industry will get funded soon as well. Exciting things are happening. Multi-touch is becoming mainstream through mobile phones, laptops and desktop computers, because of companies like Microsoft, Apple, Google, N-trig, Nextwindow and their investment firms. Because of these companies (and if you are active in the multi-touch technology industry, you should be thankful), other companies can tap into an amazing window of opportunities. In 5 years from now, our children will walk up to screens and expect them to be multi-touch. There is a clear trend that was extremely visible during 2009 and begin 2010, especially during events and exhibitions, called the iPhone syndrome? What it is, is that people walk up to screens and try to touch them, whereas they will walk away disappointed as soon as they figured out, that a screen was not interactive and probably thought that the screen was broken.

I’m eagerly looking forward to what kind of additional exciting mergers, acquisitions and investments will take place in the next 2 years in the multi-touch technology industry. It promises to be very exciting.

Natural User Interface Technologies AB (NUITEQ) is one of five nominees for the Norrmejerier-stipendiet 2010 award, for its innovative multi-touch solutions.

The jury’s motivation for the nomination is as follows:

“NUITEQ is a cutting edge technology innovator. With its unique multi-touch technology for computer screens, they are on track to put Västerbotten on the worlds IT map, which is obviously good for the region. With its high international presence and a vision to make the north of Sweden known as an innovative and creative center, NUITEQ shows a strong belief in the future. The fact that you find companies like Ferrari and Lockheed Martin on their client list, shows that the northern entrepreneurial spirit has made an impression in many locations in the world.”

Please take 30 seconds and give NUITEQ your support and vote for NUITEQ on the following URL: http://tinyurl.com/24cq2zw.