Tangible User Interface for Grasshopper

I just knocked this thing together combining Giulio, Luis and Damien's gHowl tools with reacTIVision to control grasshopper with camera tracked fiducial markers, and thought others might be interested in trying it out.

I've been wanting to do something like this for a long time, and I'm really excited about all the possibilities!

It's easy to have a go yourself - just follow this 6-step plan:

Install Processing if you don't already have it.
Get the gHowl interoperability components
Install the reacTIVision vision engine
Download the Processing TUIO client TUIO_Processing.zip, unzip the contents and place them all in a folder you create named TUIO within the libraries folder of your Processing installation ( e.g. C:\Program Files\processing-1.1\libraries\TUIO )
Print the first page of fiducials.pdf - the default marker set.*
Open/run reactivision.exe, ARGH.pde , ARGH.3dm and ARGH.ghx (contained in ARGH.rar)

Markers 0, 1 and 2 should then control the positions of 3 meshes in Rhino. (you can also easily add as many items as you like)

This is just starting steps really, but I think there is huge potential here - all sorts of ways real world models could be connected to the virtual. I'd like to try combining this with my Kangaroo physics engine at some point.

Going via Processing is probably just a temporary measure - it sounds like it might soon become possible for gHowl to listen directly to reacTIVision.

To properly augment reality it might be nice to actually try and overlay the Rhino viewport on the live video.

Anyone got any ideas on how hard this would be ?

*(If you are unable or too lazy to print them you can also send these images to your phone/pda and use it as your marker)

Comment

You need to be a member of Grasshopper to add comments!

Join Grasshopper

Comment by Mirco Bianchini on November 24, 2010 at 3:46am: Great!!!!

Comment by marco guardincerri on November 1, 2010 at 7:37am: hi daniel - i think i've understood where's the fault (even i don't understand why...)
the first time i made some mistake of spelling -just naming the library Tiuo instead of tuio (yes, you can laugh :) - but the second time i found that all the thing works on processing 1.1 but not on 1.2.1. anyway, thank you very much for sharing your research and for the further support you give me.
m

Comment by Daniel Piker on October 31, 2010 at 11:35am: Marco - do you know where the link is failing ?
1. Is reactivision running correctly and detecting the markers ?
2. Is processing correctly receiving the data from reactivision ?
3. Is the UDP component receiving any data at all ?

Comment by marco guardincerri on October 31, 2010 at 11:30am: ..very cool! but, unfortunately, it seems that nothing happen when i run it. i use grasshopper 0.8 and processing 1.2, maybe the problem is in a version conflict?
thank you very much
marco

Comment by Mårten Nettelbladt on September 22, 2010 at 1:48pm: I came across these cube things at Autodesk. http://www.autodeskresearch.com/pdf/simaud2010_deskcube.pdf
Kind of similar, but 3d?

Comment by Daniel Piker on July 25, 2010 at 7:16am: Thanks Adam.
I think those same libraries are also actually included in the UDP directory of the gHowl installation (along with instructions on copying them into the correct folder).
Sorry I forgot to mention this step in my original description.

Comment by adam on July 25, 2010 at 6:57am: Ok! it seems that processing needs extra library for a hypermedia.net UDP which is here

After downloading copy udp.jar from library folder to the processing libraries folder and run it all.

Thank You Daniel, i think i will find it as a very usefull tool.

gr

Comment by adam on July 25, 2010 at 1:17am: Hi All,

Does anyone tryed to open and run the ARGH_processin file ? I got the message from processing that hypermedia is missing.

I copied and unziped TUIO to the location :C:\Program Files\processing-1.1\libraries\TUIO
cheers