Look, touch, listen, and play: Seth Sandler's Interactive multi-touch, multi-user audio table; NUI Group News

Human-World Interaction, Multimedia, and Emerging Technologies

My HASTAC blog serves as a portal to three regularly-maintained blogs, where I share information, resources, and links that fall roughly into the following categories: Technology-Supported Human-World Interaction

Interactive Multimedia Technology

TechPsych

Seth Sandler is a university student who is finishing up his bachelor degree in Interdisciplinary Computing and the Arts, with an emphasis on Music, at the University of California, San Diego. His research and development work centers around multi-touch, multi-user musical interfaces. Seth Sandler is a member of the NUI Group, also known as the Natural User Interface Group.

I've been following Seth and the other members of the NUI group for about a year or so and it so exciting to see how things have evolved in such a short period of time.

Seth's Audio Touch blog chronicles his journey and includes pictures of the multi-touch table he built. I've attached Seth's most recent video of his table-top music application below.

About the NUI Group:

"Natural User Interface or ~ NUI Group is an interactive media group researching and creating open source machine sensing techniques to benefit artistic and educational applications."

"We offer a collaborative environment for developers that are interested in learning and sharing new HCI (Human Computer Interaction) methods and concepts. This may include topics such as: voice/handwriting/gesture recognition, touch computing, computer vision, and information visualization."

The NUI group has been selected for mentoring organization for Google's Summer of Code, for those of you who are interested in working on open-source code for multi-touch systems. The student application process begins Monday, March 24th, 2008, and ends Monday, March 31st, 2008.

NUI group's project ideas page outlines the requirements for the application, which includes a 7500 word project proposal. The project page has a long list of ideas to spark some thinking for potential Summer of Code applicants.

For those of you who aren't into coding, I encourage you to take a look at the NUI Groups project ideas page just to get an idea of the interesting ideas that are being explored. The page has a list of links to other good resources.

Share the word with anyone who might be interested in the NUI Group's projects for the Summer of Code. We need to get more people interested in STEM careers, and the project ideas outlined by the NUI group look enticing.