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

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Comment by Adam Chałupski 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 Chałupski 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

Comment by Charles Aweida on July 12, 2010 at 12:15pm: very cool

Comment by Peter Mehrtens on July 6, 2010 at 7:00am: superb

Comment by Tomasz Gancarczyk on July 5, 2010 at 8:56am: great!

Comment by Andy Payne on July 2, 2010 at 8:56am: Very impressive.

Comment by Daniel Piker on July 2, 2010 at 2:58am: 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.

Comment by Daniel Piker on July 2, 2010 at 2:27am: 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

Comment by Mårten Nettelbladt on July 2, 2010 at 12:56am: 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?

Comment by Tuan N. Tran on July 1, 2010 at 11:08pm: 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?