Lights. Camera. Action.

The first step towards our physical assembly for the FTIR table has been purchased—we have ordered a pack of Osram SFH485 IR LEDs. Creating a FTIR table requires a lot more to be done to the display surface, as opposed to a DI device where most of the extras are separate from the display.

For our display we are going to use a sheet of acrylic that is 24×18 inches (~ 61×46 cm) and placing the lights along the 24 in. sides. At this point, until we do some tests and more research, we are planning to use about 15 LEDs per side.

We ordered a pack of 100 LEDs from Digi-Key which should give us some extras to create another table or experiment later.

Once we have our our camera and acrylic we plan on doing some tests to see the best number of LEDs to use. From some blog posts we hear 1.5 centimeter apart, from others we hear that you should only need about 12 per side. We’ll see what works best when we get the equipment all set up.

Also, make sure to check out Jason Modisette’s great FTIR Screen Design Applet to help understand and visualize total internal reflection of the infrared light within the acrylic sheet.

Welcome to the uNUI Group! We are a small group who have decided to explore the realm of multi-touch interfaces as an extension of the NUI Group community. As we learn about the intricacies of building our own multi-touch devices, we will be documenting as much as we can on this website to help others through sharing of our experiences.

We are unsure of our future and the path we will find—it may revolve around building hardware and different devices, it may be primarily based in developing interface software and applications—we don’t know yet where our interests will lead us. Though, it is clear to us and many others that this is the future, that computers will relatively soon lose the cumbersome and disjointed interface of manipulating one pointer on an X-Y axis. The future of computer interaction will be multi-touch, sensitive to pressures and flow, multi-user, and much more intuitive—hence, a Natural User Interface.

There is a fun and informative online community that is constantly growing as more interest picks up in multi-touch research. To see some of the great sites and technologies we’ve come across, visit our Resources page.