Tangible User Interface for Grasshopper

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:

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)

Ángel Linares

Reactable + GH ----> GREAT!!!! Amazing work :) Really fast response.

Jul 1, 2010
Borja Gancedo

I found it very interesting, If you dont mind I would like to try and play with your description but have problems to download "ARGH.rar what can I do?. thank you..

Jul 1, 2010
Tuan N. Tran

Hi Daniel

Such an exciting tool and thank you for sharing. I too have the same problem of downloading ARGH.rar Can you please repost the link?

Jul 1, 2010
Mårten Nettelbladt

Very nice! Can you also lift those markers and spin them around in 3d? (I guess the camera needs to see the pattern all the time) What about cubes with different patterns on all six sides?

Jul 2, 2010
Daniel Piker

Sorry about the problem with the file. I can't get it to work on Ning for some reason, but here it is on Dropbox : http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2464688/ARGH.rar

Jul 2, 2010
Daniel Piker

and Mårten - not yet, Reactivision is really geared towards this sort of tabletop interaction.
I think probably something like ARToolkit will be a better choice for fully 3D marker tracking (which is what I am really after too) - actually that was what I tried to use first, but reactivision just turned out to be a bit easier to get started with. I am still trying with ARToolkit, and will keep you posted.

Jul 2, 2010
Andy Payne

Very impressive.

Jul 2, 2010
Tomasz Gancarczyk

great!

Jul 5, 2010
Peter Mehrtens

superb

Jul 6, 2010
Charles Aweida

very cool

Jul 12, 2010
Adam Chałupski

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

Jul 25, 2010
Adam Chałupski

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

Jul 25, 2010
Daniel Piker

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.

Jul 25, 2010
Mårten Nettelbladt

I came across these cube things at Autodesk. http://www.autodeskresearch.com/pdf/simaud2010_deskcube.pdf
Kind of similar, but 3d?

Sep 22, 2010
marco guardincerri

..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

Oct 31, 2010
Daniel Piker

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 ?

Oct 31, 2010
marco guardincerri

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

Nov 1, 2010
Mirco Bianchini

Great!!!!

Nov 24, 2010
Alexandra Pittiglio

Hey Daniel,

I realize this project was super long ago but I'm trying to create something similar to what you've done here. I posted about it on your forum as well a few days ago. Having trouble with the VB.Net script provided. I'm using the latest version of Grasshopper and I think that may be the problem. I'm very new to Grasshopper..

My error messages read as follows. Do you have an idea of what the problem might be? Do I need to run the old Grasshopper for this script to work? I'm sure I could get it running by adjusting the code I am just not sure how.

May 18, 2016