Holoscreen is attached!

Yes I know it's Friday night and I should be at the pub but my colleagues are growing anxious at my lack of blogging so I thought I better post something to pacify them.

This week I finally got the DNP Holoscreen attached to the bookcase. It's a temporary bodge at the moment just so I can figure out if / how everything is going to work. I'm hoping to neaten things up and adjust the positioning of the screen so it fits onto the front of the bookcase a bit better next week, but this will do for now. Below are a few pics;

DNP logo and felt covered hinge which attaches the glass to the bookcase

Dodgy cardboard washer and bolt arrangement (this will be sorted out soon!)


View of the bookcase with the glass screen closed (notice the overlap on the right, that will be fixed soon too!)

View of the bookcase with the door open. Only one shelf at the moment. Eventually the shelves will be a bit shallower.

Also this week I've been playing round with OpenCV and managed to detect coloured bits of card which I stuck to my finger (yes I looked crazy when testing it, waving my cardboard covered finger around in mid-air). Using this I can find out the position of my finger in front of a webcam and also the angle (by doing some maths on the two known points). The angle part isn't working very well yet (need to add some Kalman filtering or similar) but the position seems to work pretty well. Managed to knock up a simple Java app which let me move the pointer around the screen using my finger and select boxes by hovering over them for a second. I'm still not sure whether to use this or the Wiimote (or something else), but hopefully testing next week should sort that out.

Picture of my hand with the bits of card on. My OpenCV program looks for the green and blue coloured parts of the image and uses backprojection, thresholding and blob detection to work out the positions of the finger tip and joint. This information is then sent over the network to my Java app.

Finally I've also been finalising the business plan competition entry this week, which is due in on Tuesday.

I'm still looking for a better name than Touchpacity, suggestions would be most welcome.

Anyway, time to stop working and head to the pub!