Multi-touch physics demos

Here are a couple multi-touch physics demos that you may want to check out if multi-touch tables are your thing:

http://rxsurface.blogspot.com/2008/05/introducing-multitouch-crayon-physics.html

and

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rxsurface/2351234376/

What’s interesting to see is how Google is enabling these Surface-like, multi-touch efforts through it’s student summer programming programs. There’s a whole TouchLib that Google is hosting here which was built in part during this past summer. If you want to experiment with the binaries you can download them here and build your own multi-touch panel using the video below as a guide and Seth Sandlers’ description on his blog.

There’s a whole community growing out of these efforts. Keep your eyes on YouTube if you have any doubts.

I downloaded the binaries, but haven’t been successful yet in getting them working. I imagine I have a configuration issue somewhere along the line. Maybe I’ll have some time this weekend to figure out what it is. Their implementation is classic open source, so you’ll see a little bit of this, a little bit of that, a half dozen libraries required, and sparse documentation to boot. This isn’t holding back eager people from following their recipes though. Great to see such excitement.