Well, as many of you know, Multi Touch gestures are now becoming a part of any iPhone, iPod Touch or new MacBook Pro owner’s new gesticulative repertoire. I mean, who hasn’t tried to swipe or pinch at a cash machine screen or, imagined themselves navigating their Radio Times in a ‘Minority Reportesque’ fashion.
I know I have!
Now, it appears that Multi Touch gestures are now set to play a BIG part in the future of OS X, albeit not at the hands of Apple…for now at least. For we can be sure that the technowizards over at number 1 Infinite Loop will be hot on the heels of this new technology.
Step up Christian Moore, the one man who has, thus far, got this system running at full speed on a simple Intel-based MacBook. His Lux free open framework enables true multitouch interaction in Mac OS X. In fact,he’s so confident he says it can work under any platform and even a web browser, enabling complex user interfaces and object manipulation comparable to Jeff Han’s magic walls or the Microsoft Surface anywhere.
The folks over at gizmodo, specifically Jesus Diaz have interviewed the man himself:
Jesus Diaz: Tell me more about Lux. This is a framework that anybody can use, right? Under any platform?
Christian Moore: Well, yeah, is an open source framework I’ve been working on for experimenting with user interfaces. It’s more a general framework than targeting one main deployment platform. That video is actually all AS3 running in Flash 9 over Mac OS X, but you can integrate it with any development system and platform.JD: Why Flash?
CM: Because it’s fast to prototype in. However, the software is broken into several segments. One C++ application that tracks hands that talks to Flash… WPF… or another C++ app… and basically everything you can imagine. You can enable multitouch in any environment, like Cocoa.JD: So anyone can grab the framework and make native multitouch apps right in Mac OS X or Windows or Linux.
CM: Yeah. We have an Xcode-developed app for photo and paint coming, as well as a tracking application. But using Flash for this demo was the fastest way for us at the moment.JD: How many people did this?
CM: I did the core system, but four people from the NUI Group contributed demos.JD: What machine is running the demo in the video? Looks amazingly fast.
CM: Just a MacBook.JD: And for the multitouch screen?
CM: I use a ~box from naturalui. It’s ghetto tech, I know, but I developed the majority of Lux on a cardboard box. And it works great.JD: Indeed, it looks like it works perfectly right. How does this compare to frameworks like UITouch, in the iPhone?
CM: Apple’s UITouch its very, very well designed. It runs at the core level, while ours is more a free environment to develop on top… to learn about multitouch and share code.
So.. the future looks, well, rosy to say the least, we just hope that Apple aren’t too touchy (yes, I went there…) that they were beaten to it.
As always, we’ll keep you up to date with any developments as they happen.
In the meantime, check out the gizmodo article for a couple of videos that show Lux in action…
Loading ...