Single multi-touch display and Eyefinity Display Groups

[mrmacmusic]

Apologies if this has been covered before, but searching hasn't been my friend so I'm hoping for some clarification and advice please...

I have acquired a Wacom Cintiq 22HD Touch which I will be using creatively with my Mac, but also as a multi-touch display for Ventuz development. Having connected this up to our VBOX it is recognised by the system as a touch device without the need to install any Windows drivers (so I've opted not to complicate things by installing anything, at least for the time being). Ventuz feedback shows me raw touch data so I figure all seems good... so far!

First question: when I create an Eyefinity Display Group including the Cintiq and 2 other 1920x1080 monitors, I get the 2+1 arrangement I want for the current Ventuz project (2 displays for main output, single touch display for interaction), however touches on the Cintiq are mapped across the entire canvas area of the display group... this is presumably the expected (and correct) behaviour? Is there a way to correctly map the touches on the Cintiq display to its' physical position in the display group, and therefore have the co-ordinates mapped to the physical display inside Ventuz? (I'm presuming perhaps this is an Eyefinity feature that hasn't been written yet!)

Second question: I am getting around this problem by creating a sort of 'touch overlay' whereby hidden geometry for required buttons etc. are placed across the entire canvas. If I render this into a render target, scale it using mapping and use it to texture a rectangle that is positioned where the touch display is, it all seems to work OK... however I'm wondering if I'm going about this the correct way?

Third (and final) question: what happens if I want to add a second touch display to the group? Would this perhaps require a workaround using TUIO (rather than Windows Touch) for each display on different ports?

As is probably clear, this is my first chance to experiment with touch interactivity, and I know moving forward we will want to be doing more exciting fancy things with it, so I'm hoping someone can give me some pointers to ensure I'm deploying 'best practice' rather than just bodging a solution

[mrmacmusic]

Your right, I believe I already answered similar questions a number of times over the years But no problem, here goes:

1. Yes, it is expected behavior that the touch device maps to the whole rendering surface (e.g. all three screens)
2. There are two ways currently to support your scenario: Use the TUIO tool to transform touch information on they way between the device and Ventuz: https://code.google.com/p/tuiotoolbox/ . The other way requires us to write you a customized (hacked) DLL of our input system that does that mapping internally. We have done that for a couple of people which had weird setups in long running installations (museums and so on). However, you would have to contact our sales department about that...
3. No, at the time Ventuz only supports a single touch device. While all of the underlying technology has been written to support multiple devices, it never really was a use case for use. Most multi-touch-multi-screen installations use TUIO and can use external tools to combine it to one virtual device.

Thanks Alex, I appreciate the confirmation, and will have a look at the TUIO tool... hopefully it won't be beyond me! I know that whilst I'm just starting to scratch the surface here, longer term we will I'm sure want to leverage simultaneous multiple touch/interactive inputs – e.g. laser scanning the main screen plus a touch podium and/or AV control – I'm just wanting to start out on the right lines.

4. Yes, you can theoretically use such a "virtual scene" or "touch proxies" as the input subsystem doesn't care about rendering, just about intersection testing. But I would do something like this only as a last resort and always favor manipulating the input.

Can I ask why? Performance issues? My initial testing shows that it works perfectly (although my test scene is hardly complex), although I can see issues arising when I start having to combine edge-blended main output plus a touch display (or displays)......
.

[mrmacmusic]

... In the past, if someone was trying to run both the podium and the wall from one machine, the sole reason was trying to do the job of what would better be two Ventuz licenses/machines with one.

With this particular project I need to show a live video input on the podium and the wall, but also be able to interact with the live video input at the podium (e.g. zoom, highlight, paint on top etc) and show this interaction on the main wall... Maybe 2 machines is more appropriate, I just figured in this case it was simpler with one? We do have enough Ventuz licenses to be able to effect a multi-machine solution.

...you get an unnecessary duplication of stuff (one copy for touch, one for rendering) and that introduces a potential source of errors for an operator building/testing a scene. From a technical standpoint, there is nothing that prevents you from using that solution...

At least I know it's technically OK to go down the proxy touch route, but I do appreciate that it's a more convoluted scene build/test process.

By the way, there are some people that use a single, dedicated machine which runs a stripped down version of the main scene for touch handling and the broadcast the touch node outputs via OSC to all the render machines. So you basically disable the implicit axis functionality in the touch node, add an explicit one and connection them via OSC nodes. The advantage of this is that all render machines do not have to do an interpretation of the touch movement and the result will always be consistent among the machines.

Thanks... very useful

[joysprod]

I dont know if this helps...

http://touch-base.com/download.asp

I was able to have 4 monitors set up in Eyefinity as 4 across, and position my touchscreen within any of those 4. In the software you can then re-position the touch screen where you require it.

Their website allows you to put in the make and model number of the touch monitor or overlay and they will send you a full working driver with a limit of 100 touches for testing purposes. I havent looked to see if your model is supported but they also have a lot of generic drivers.

I did not require any mods to Ventuz to make it work.

Peter

[mrmacmusic]

I dont know if this helps...

http://touch-base.com/download.asp

I was able to have 4 monitors set up in Eyefinity as 4 across, and position my touchscreen within any of those 4. In the software you can then re-position the touch screen where you require it.

Their website allows you to put in the make and model number of the touch monitor or overlay and they will send you a full working driver with a limit of 100 touches for testing purposes. I havent looked to see if your model is supported but they also have a lot of generic drivers.

I did not require any mods to Ventuz to make it work.

Peter

Thanks for that Peter, it may well prove extremely useful... I've sent the request for an evaluation driver.