I Can Haz Multi-touch

[Mike Brown]

Looks like HP is going to have a HUGE sales quarter, being the only win7 multi-touch enabled pc vendor.

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=9014256&type=product&id=1218008373429

 

BTW Doc, you weren't spoiling anything regarding native Multi-touch in Win 7...they already had it listed as a session topic on the website. What I was saying is that it would have been cool if they gave us a multi-touch peripheral to use with existing hardware rather than having to purchase new hardware. But I think I'll go ahead and get the Touchsmart...once I can find someone with it in stock. 

 

[Mark Smith]

Yeah - as soon as I saw them in the keynote I knew they'd do well this quarter.   I played with one in the hall and it was pretty sweet.   

Has anyone actually tried to use them with the Surface simulator?  I asked one of the devs if it worked as a surface multi-touch (vs. Win7 MT) but he didn't know.  It would be very nice to get 80% of the surface functionality for testing at 1/10 the cost!

I've got a Fry's right down the street, I might run down there and see if they've got any around..

mark

[Karl Shifflett]

I was reading but didn’t see Windows 7 on the web page.

 

Where did you read about the unit supporting Win 7 and multi-touch?

[Mark Smith]

I'd be surprised if they say anything about Win7 -- it looks like it comes with Vista and special drivers to support their apps + a touch-based mouse/stylus driver.  

Reading blogs (primarily this one [1]), it appears the unit supports touch, but not multi-touch with Win7.  Apparently, the hardware IS multi-touch but the drivers are not (at least not yet).  So, you can use it in single-touch mode, ala paint applications and such, but multiple inputs isn't supported yet.  Given that it's one of the only units out there (I think Dell has one too), I would hope the Win7 team will ship some drivers to support it. 

I played with a unit at the pavilion, and it was solid for a single touch, but multiple fingers (like to pinch or expand) didn't always work the way I expected it to.   That said, it's just plain cool to touch, drag, scroll using your fingers on the screen vs. a trackpad or mouse.

mark

[1] http://www.lorenheiny.com/2008/10/30/steven-sinofsky-multi-touch-drivers-not-available-for-hp-touchsmart-yet/

[Mike Brown]

The HP Smart Touch was the machine they used to demonstrate Win 7 at the keynote. They kept emphasizing that this is a machine you can purchase now for $1500 IdentityMine also had a unit at their booth showing off a cool app (whose layout panel I would love to see in a future Blendables release).

 

Probably the coolest unit on demo...and I can't believe I didn't bother learning the name...was a 37" widescreen multi-touch monitor with Live Earth on it...

[Mike Brown]

I do believe they said that the multi-touch support is in a later build than the release they gave us :( but still...the Touchsmart is definitely something I can buy now that will (in theory at least) support mult-touch later.

[Karl Shifflett]

I have  a HP touch screen laptop I’m hoping will be upgradable too.

[Dr. WPF]

The latest drivers for the TouchSmart do support multitouch.  Most of the non-WPF Win7 demos shown at PDC were built using the Win32 multitouch APIs.

Unfortunately, WPF does not yet surface (no pun intended) this support for multitouch.  You can use the realtime stylus support in WPF to handle the touch input, but unfortunately, this does not yet support the notion of multicapture (multiple touch points each having their own notion of capture).  As such, you can't really do the cool multitouch stuff yet, (such as pinching to resize or using multiple fingers to manipulate visuals) using support in the native framework.

The multitouch support on the HP TouchSmart PCs is provided via firmware provided by a company called NextWindow.  They also provide a membrane overlay that can be put over any monitor.  This is how the 42-inch flat panels in IdentityMine's booth provided multitouch support.

If you made it to IdentityMine's booth and played with their demos, you probably noticed that they do indeed show off full multitouch support in WPF.  They have written their own library that interacts with the NextWindow driver and Win32 multitouch APIs to provide this multitouch support.  In fact, IdentityMine has abstracted the contact support in Surface and the multitouch support in Win7 to provide a single interface for writing multitouch WPF applications that will run on both platforms.  They announced their partnership with NextWindow (here and here) immediately after Tuesday's keynote.

Quoting "wpf-di...@googlegroups.com" <wpf-di...@googlegroups.com>:

> The HP Smart Touch was the machine they used to demonstrate Win 7 at the
> keynote. They kept emphasizing that this is a machine you can purchase now
> for $1500 IdentityMine also had a unit at their booth showing off a cool app
> (whose layout panel I would love to see in a future Blendables release).
>
> Probably the coolest unit on demo...and I can't believe I didn't bother
> learning the name...was a 37" widescreen multi-touch monitor with Live Earth
> on it...
>
> On Sat, Nov 1, 2008 at 2:52 PM, Karl Shifflett <ka...@littlerichie.com>wrote:
>
>>  I was reading but didn't see Windows 7 on the web page.
>>
>>
>>
>> Where did you read about the unit supporting Win 7 and multi-touch?
>>
>>
>>

>> *From:* wpf-di...@googlegroups.com [mailto:
>> wpf-di...@googlegroups.com] *On Behalf Of *Mark Smith
>> *Sent:* Saturday, November 01, 2008 11:24 AM
>> *To:* wpf-di...@googlegroups.com
>> *Subject:* [WPF Disciples] Re: I Can Haz Multi-touch

>>
>>
>>
>> Yeah - as soon as I saw them in the keynote I knew they'd do well this
>> quarter.   I played with one in the hall and it was pretty sweet.
>>
>>
>>
>> Has anyone actually tried to use them with the Surface simulator?  I asked
>> one of the devs if it worked as a surface multi-touch (vs. Win7 MT) but he
>> didn't know.  It would be very nice to get 80% of the surface functionality
>> for testing at 1/10 the cost!
>>
>>
>>
>> I've got a Fry's right down the street, I might run down there and see if
>> they've got any around..
>>
>>
>>
>> mark
>>
>>
>>
>> On Nov 1, 2008, at 12:51 PM, Mike Brown wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>  Looks like HP is going to have a HUGE sales quarter, being the only win7
>> multi-touch enabled pc vendor.
>>
>>
>> http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=9014256&type=product&id=1218008373429
>>
>>
>>
>> BTW Doc, you weren't spoiling anything regarding native Multi-touch in Win
>> 7...they already had it listed as a session topic on the website. What I was
>> saying is that it would have been cool if they gave us a multi-touch
>> peripheral to use with existing hardware rather than having to purchase new
>> hardware. But I think I'll go ahead and get the Touchsmart...once I can find
>> someone with it in stock.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>

Dr. WPF - Online Office at http://www.drwpf.com/blog/

[Jeremiah Morrill]

I didn't know HP used the NextWindow.  I've done development with NextWindow's SDK and I was very disappointed in my experience.  Anytime I used their API in Winforms, it worked fine.  The same code moved over to a WPF app, would cause an intermittent "Arithmetic error" and gave no exception point.  After further investigation, turned out to be some floating point issue in unmanaged code and was fixed via doing some nasty Win32 calls in the WPF app.  I finally just moved the whole multitouch thing to it's own process. 

The other thing that was disappointing about the NextWindow system was it could only detect 2 touch points total AND it would not detect two points being active if both points touched the screen at the same time.  You'd have to touch with one finger..then the other.  I thought this was my code, but this limitation existed in their demo applications also.

This application was made in total haste, so maybe it was me not reading directions...or the model/firmware I was using.  I hope these issues no longer exist...

-Jer

[Dr. WPF]

I think the thing that was missing before was the OS-level support for multitouch.  You should try again on Win7, Jer.

>> (here<http://news.yahoo.com/s/prweb/20081028/bs_prweb/prweb1539074_2>and
>> here <http://news.yahoo.com/s/prweb/20081028/bs_prweb/prweb1539184_1>)

[Jeremiah Morrill]

I've have to try it out next time I have the opportunity.  My time spent with NextWindow was very minimal (was quickish demo-ware).  The OS level integration of multi-touch is very sweet (I watched some of the PDC sessions).  At least that means NextWindow will support 64bit now ;)

-Jer

[Mike Brown]

Okay...I've just gone ape shit over here! Especially over this Multitouch enabled whiteboard. Must get!