Today marked the beginning of Round 2 of user testing with Part 1 - the Affinity Diagram exercise. From Round 1 (User Testing - Part 1) the voluntary participant number wasn't high enough so a second round of user testing was required. The testing today went very well overall. I'm glad to say that the system didn't crash, as it did during Round 1 - Part 1 (so the modification I made to the open source code seemed to resolve the issue that was occurring).

The largest challenge with the user testing today seemed to be when the digital sticky notes would either move to the default top left corner (the 0,0 coordinate) or it would move to the location of the last touch point (which was usually another testing participants touch point). This seems to be an issue with Community Core Vision (CCV), the open source code, and the ActionScript 3.0 class which communication with CCV.

The digital post-it notes being sorted included various popular social networking sites, such as Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, etc. Special thanks for volunteering to be video taped - Sean S., Brian E., Ben T., and Mike M.

Yesterday (April 19th 2010), I started part 1 of the user testing for my research project regarding the multi-touch device and software application I've been developing. The software application is based on the Six Sigma Affinity Diagram (aka KJ Analysis) exercise. This is typically used to sort through qualitative data (such as ideas from a brainstorming session) to find unforeseen relationships between the the data items / ideas by grouping them into categories.

I was granted permission by Dr. Mary Sadowski, Associate Dean for the College of Technology at Purdue University, to ask faculty members from a committee within the College of Technology to use my multi-touch device and software application to aide them in sorting through some ideas/outcomes regarding a project they are working on.


Image 1 - Doing a run-through prior to user testing during set-up.


Image 2 - User Testing.

During the user testing the software application unfortunately crashed twice. Each time the users had to restart the Affinity Diagram from the beginning. After the second crash, I went into the code and quickly made some alterations. The problem was occurring with an open-source class written in ActionScript 3.0 which processes data received from Community Core Vision (the open-source software which interprets the images received from the camera component of the device's hardware). I added some "try / catch" statements. This seemed to resolve the issue since the software application didn't crash after the modifications.

Overall, the user testing proved to be successful. Excellent data was collected both regarding the interaction of user-to-user and user-to-interface. Also, notes for improvements to the software application.

I originally hoped to use the ColorPicker component in Flash but I was having too many problems trying to modify the code behind the component to get it to recognize the Touch Events from CCV and TUIO. For the sake of time and meeting my approaching deadline, I decided to ditch that idea and just make a set number of colors that will automatically be selected as groups/categories are created.

Below is an example of what I've come up with so far.



Still more to come, next is the ability to vote on the priority of categories/groups.

I've made progress on my multi-touch software. I can now have multiple assets displayed on the device being touched (selected) at the same time and have events respond respectively to each individual asset selected. Getting this to work was a major accomplishment. Thank goodness for error catching.



Now I've run into another problem trying to save over an existing XML file with updated data. Spent about 3 hours this evening trying to figure it out without much success. I've searched Google to see what other people have tried but I've yet to find a working solution... slightly frustrating. If I find one, I'll post about it.

So now that the hardware of the multi-touch device is essentially done (there are some things I could probably do to further improve it), I've moved on to the software development side. I've been working in Adobe Flash CS4 with ActionScript 3.0. It's been a lot of trial and error testing code as I go. However, I'm making progress - just slow progress.

One of the major hurtles was a problem I ran into with embedFont = true; making the dynamic textfields disappear. But I found a solution and blogged about it - link.

The multi-touch device I've been building since June is finally working now. There can be some tweaking and calibrating to improve its performance, but at least now its working.



Above pictures are using demo apps from the NUI Group.

My sincerest thanks to Mark Miller from Miller & Associates. I met Mark at the Adobe MAX 2009 conference in Los Angeles, California. His company had teamed up with Adobe to build a multi-touch device for the conference to showcase using Adobe Flash for multi-touch devices. He was generous enough to provide me with a sheet of enlightened acrylic outfitted with an aluminum track and infrared LEDs. At Adobe MAX you truely can "connect, discover, and inspire." Here are some pictures of the enlightened acrylic with CCV running:




Thanks again Mark for supporting a graduate student.

Today I spent time working on AS3 code for my multi-touch device. I found the following links very helpful:

• http://wiki.nuigroup.com/Building_Your_First_Application
• http://code.google.com/p/multitouchas3experiments/

A few days ago I also changed the configuration of my mutli-touch device from a tabletop (horizontal) orientation to a wall (vertical) orientation. I mainly did this after the PS3 Eye camera arrived to see if the PS3 Eye would detect the hot spot created on the acrylic from the projector's light beam. I was pleased to see that the camera didn't detect the hot spot.

My new PS3 Eye camera arrived to replace the other infrared camera I had been using. The PS3 Eye was modified to capture infrared light. After swapping out the camera, my multi-touch device was responding much better.

Some progress was made with the multi-touch device I've been building. Using the CCV software and some demo Flash apps provided on the CCV web site, here are some pictures and a video:

I've started building my own multi-touch device after reading several posts of blogs and forums through the NUI Group web site (www.nuigroup.com). I complied a list of commonly mentioned components and ordered them on-line. If anyone wants the list I can post that on here.




Yesterday I tried to run my multi-touch device with the Community Core Vision (formerly tBeta) software from the NUI Group. However the software wasn't detecting the blobs created by the fingers in contact with the surface of the device. It seemed that it was picking up too much heat reflecting off the backside of the acrylic/Plexiglas. I also tried to use a mirror to bounce the projector's image to the backside of the multi-touch device with the infrared camera next to the mirror to see if this would help with the situation. However, there wasn't a noticeable difference. Back to the grindstone to figure out what's wrong and why it isn't working correctly.