Anirudh Sharma

After modifying the Microsoft Lifecam VX-1000 we were ready for our first test, if we were getting the blobs or not . The first shot went great, we got what we had imagined as seen in the NUI videos. The clean blobs are the heart and soul of every Multi-touch display based on FTIR. The couple of screenshots we took are attached with this post. We were elated !

After much haggling and bargaining we got our 6 mm thick plexi-glass sheet, after manual polishing and shining the task at hand was to fit in the LED's inside so as to facilitate the FTIR ( Frustrated Total Internal Reflection) , this principle behind the project. Since Sudhanshu and Rahul were most affluent in Electronics and Architecture, we moved to R.S. Electronics, owned by Rahul's father "Mr. ... " so as to get our LED's fixed in the acrylic frame. After putting in 15 hours we could get the IR LEDs fixed into the wooden frame. Here are some images of Infrared glowing acrylic frame from a night-vision camera. Along that, I modified the Microsoft Lifecam VX1000 ( removing the Infrared Filter, putting up a IR bandpass filter). That's how it looked before and after Coming up's how we obtained our neat and sweet blobs :-)

After covering up with the complaint Acrylic Surface the table would look something like this. This was it, this is it :-)

The problem we faced- We experimented with a variety of Projectors from the college's computer lab, we found Mitsubishi XD490u fitting best to our 16:9 needs and the setup alignment. However, we couldn't afford it, so had to get it issued from the Computer Science engineering Dept. of our college. Although college projector couldn't be availed everytime we need to present the table outside the campus, so we got a task at hand- Making the Multitouch table in a manner that any projector could fit up neatly inside. See the rails in green, now any fitted in projector can move to and fro, forward-backward (n-1 degrees of freedom) . The yellow base supports the projector using a shoe-strip holder, Good thing! we could now fit in any projector we wanted to :-)

It all started in way back in the humid month of August, 2008, when we planned to build a multitouch table prototype on our own. The terms like "complaint surface" , "display ratio", "angle of throw" started to make a little sense to us. I showed the NUI video to Sudhanshu, Rahul - after getting mesmerized by what all is achievable by Multitouch they got fired up :-) We were a team now. Soon started the after classroom planning session, three of us would meet after the college-time and pondered on how it will be done. We were clear about what we wanted to have/achieve, although "how to do it" wasn't still clear to us. Due to Google Summer of Code 2008 I was in touch with Divesh Jaiswal, who had helped us quite a lot everywhere we faced a difficulty. During the summer hols, when Deej( Divesh) was in Delhi , we fixed up a meeting, thereby I could get my hands on the high powered Infrared LEDs, and ROSCO, which could have been a pain to find oth...