New Microsoft Touchless Demo: Multi-touch without Touch

Well, Microsoft has just release their new Touchless SDK which enables the user to give input using gesture, without touch :) This is possible via the use of color tracking with web camera.

The Touchless SDK is an open source SDK for .NET applications. It enables developers to create multi-touch based applications using a webcam for input. Color based markers defined by the user are tracked and their information is published through events to clients of the SDK. In a nutshell, the Touchless SDK enables touch without touching.

However, I found that running the demo isn't quite straight forward. Here is what you need to do.

1. Set up your web camera by selecting the camera you want to use in "Camera" page.
   
   
2. Set up the markers. You need to use "Markers" which should be objects with bright colors such as tennis ball, a plastic toy. You need to get the web camera to see your marker and click "Add A New Marker" button. The image will be freeze and you need to mark area of your marker by click on the image and drag a circle around your marker. After that, the demo will be able to track your marker like this.
   
   
   
3. Now, enjoy the demo! :)

For those who still cannot run the demo now, you can watch the video of demo program running here.



Related Page:

• Touchless SDK on CodePlex - http://www.codeplex.com/touchless

Live.com Doesn't Like Thai People

Long time ago, I was trying to sign up an e-mail account for my friend, Nattaporn, at live.com. But I was unable to. Live.com tell me that the user name "nattaporn" contains word that is not allowed.

Today, I tried to sign up with my mother name again and got the same error message.

What the two names have in common is the "porn" segment which is very common for Thai names. I am sure there are millions of Thai people those have their names containing "porn" (-พร). For instance, Siriporn (สิริพร), Nattaporn (ณัฎฐ์พร), Tuangporn (ตวงพร), Pornchai (พรชัย), Pornsook (พรสุข). "Porn" is, in fact, a good word in Thai which means "Blessing".

Live.com may has to reconsider this name filtering criteria since it is losing many of Thai users.