As my proposal was approved to the Google Summer of Code (GSOC) 2009, now it is time to enjoy the community bounding and start working

The title is:

Recognition, Tracking and Association of Hands, Fingers, and Blobs: A Community Core Upgrade
Student: Thiago Araujo
Mentor: Laurence Muller

Main details can be found on: http://nuigroup.com/?ACT=28&fid=86&aid=2932_9UkjmROAVO2IXGyvi1fI

Most of the things of how to achieve this task, I am still studying, talking with some people, with the mentors and the ~ community to get the best approach. I do not promise to be posting a lot of information, but as soon as I get ( and I hope that I will get..hehe ) something interesting to show I will promptly post on this blog and on the Nuigroup forum. Congratulations to all the other accepted students from Nuigroup, and to the other mentoring organizations involved on GSOC too.

A special “congrat” to the other 4 students from my university ( Universidade Federal de Campina Grande – UFCG) that got accepted:

• André Dieb Martins – Enlightenment – Electrical Engineering
• Danilo Araújo de Freitas – Python – Computer Science
• Felipe Ribeiro Nogueira Barbosa – PHP – Computer Science
• Thiago de Freitas Oliveira Araújo – NuiGroup – Electrical Engineering
• Thiago Sousa Santos  - GStreamer – Computer Science

And to the other 6 students selected to Nuigroup:

Multi-touch Extension Module for Google SketchUp
Student: Anirudh Sharma
Mentor: Pawel Solyga

NUI Paint: Exploring and developing new multi-touch interactions by creating new widgets for a concrete graphics application
Student: Sharath Patali
Mentor: Thomas Hansen

MPX X.Org TUIO Driver
Student: Ryan Huffman
Mentor: Martin Kaltenbrunner
Creating Models for Learning and Recognizing Gestures
Student: Sashikanth Damaraju
Mentor: Alexander Popovich

Component-Based HCI UI Framework and High-Level HCI Library for Java
Student: Ori Rawlings
Mentor: Christian Moore

An openframeworks toolkit for developing multi-touch musical interfaces
Student: Dimitri Diakopoulos
Mentor: Seth Sandler

The Beta, tbeta for short, is a open source/cross-platform solution for computer vision and multi-touch sensing. It takes an video input stream and outputs tracking data (e.g. coordinates and blob size) and touch events (e.g. finger down, moved and released) that are used in building multi-touch applications. tbeta can interface with various web cameras and video devices as well as connect to various TUIO/OSC enabled applications and supports many multi-touch lighting techniques including: FTIR, DI, DSI, and LLP with expansion planned for the future (custom modules/filters).

What is Touchlib?

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Touchlib is a library for creating multi-touch interaction surfaces. It handles tracking blobs of infrared light, and sends your programs these multi-touch events, such as ‘finger down’, ‘finger moved’, and ‘finger released’. It includes a configuration app and a few demos to get you started, and will interace with most types of webcams and video capture devices. It currently works only under Windows but efforts are being made to port it to other platforms.

I just posted the developers explanation about the two main community cores from the Nuigroup for dealing with the “low-level” multi-touch aspects that I am going to be working on the GSOC 2009