Tangible User Interface for Grasshopper

by Daniel Piker

Jul 1, 2010


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:

  1. Install Processing if you don't already have it.
  2. Get the gHowl interoperability components
  3. Install the reacTIVision vision engine
  4. 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 )
  5. Print the first page of fiducials.pdf - the default marker set.*
  6. 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)

Load Previous Comments

  • Alexandra Pittiglio

    Nevermind I figured it out. Not sure why it wasn't initially working but I simply deleted re-ran it a couple times and now it's fine.

    May 19, 2016

  • César Cañadas Fernández

    hello everyone! 

    Daniel, we are working with your instructions but we have a really big problem.. the dropbox file is totally missed... Could you upload the dropfile ARGH.rar??? 

    Thanks for everything!

    May 11, 2017

  • oscar

    Does anyeone have the ARCH.rar file or know where it is? Thanks a lottttt!!!!!!!

    May 12, 2017