Filed under: multitouch — Harry van der Veen @ 9:13 am
NUITEQ’s partner Elektrosil presented different table-designs of the dreaMTouch, a multi-user multi-touch system, on the Electronica Show 2010 in Munich, running Snowflake Suite.
Below you’ll find an interview (in German).
NUITEQ’s Snowflake Suite is compatible with the dreaMTouch and be chosen as an optional item when purchasing the system.
For any inquiries regarding dreaMTouch or Snowflake, you can contact NUITEQ or Elektrosil.
Filed under: multitouch — Harry van der Veen @ 10:14 am
Los Angeles here we come!
Skellefteå, Sweden – 23 December 2010 – Natural User Interface Technologies AB (NUITEQ) announced today it has been selected as Finalist for Red Herring’s top 100 Global award, a prestigious list honoring the year’s most promising private technology ventures from around the world.
The Red Herring editorial team selected the most innovative companies from a pool of 1200 companies from across the world – the Finalists from its Red Herring Asia, Europe and North America Awards. The nominees are evaluated on both quantitative and qualitative criteria, such as financial performance, technology innovation, quality of management, execution of strategy, and integration into their respective industries.
This unique assessment of potential is complemented by a review of the actual track record and standing of a company, which allows Red Herring to see past the “buzz” and make the list an important instrument for discovering and advocating the greatest business opportunities in the industry.
“2010 was very difficult but extremely rewarding,” said Alex Vieux, publisher and CEO of Red Herring. “Despite lingering effects of the global economic situation, there are many great companies producing truly innovative and amazing technologies, to the extent that we had a hard time narrowing the pool and selecting the finalists. NUITEQ shows great promise therefore deserves to be among the Finalists. Now we’re faced with the difficult task of selecting the Winners of the Top 100 Global Award.”
“We are very excited to a 2010 Red Herring 100 Global Finalist. Being picked from a pool of 1200 companies around the world, feels like a big honor.”, said NUITEQ’s CEO Harry van der Veen. “I’m very much looking forward to present NUITEQ in the finals in LA, especially considering the fact that we are currently looking for our second round of venture capital to accelerate NUITEQ’s growth. The finals will be a hotspot of good investors.”
Finalists for the award are selected based upon their technological innovation, management strength, market size, investor record, customer acquisition, and financial health. During the several months leading up to the announcement, hundreds of companies in spaces such as mobile, security, Web 2.0, software, hardware, biotech, and clean tech sent in their submissions to qualify for the award.
The Finalists are invited to present their winning strategies at the Red Herring Global forum in Los Angeles, January 24-26, 2011.
The Top 100 winners will be announced at a special awards ceremony on January 26 at the event.
Filed under: multitouch — Harry van der Veen @ 2:59 pm
The adoption of Multitouch Technologies (MT) is starting to be felt all throughout the Advertising Industry. The initial foray of these market punters are to adopt MT as an enhancement to digital signage solutions.
However, even though people do understand the age old adage that physical interaction with a message or advertisement will increase message retention, ad agencies still have very little data on how to quantify the benefits of touch. Especially, Multitouch.
In this age of the information superhighway, traditional media which relies on broadcasting or narrowcasting has very limited effectiveness.
Broadcasting is essentially utilizing a message which is designed and put in place to hit a generic crowd i.e. Billboards. This implies wastage.
Narrowcasting is on the other end of the spectrum where a message is narrowed down to such a specific demographic that it will only target a very small catchment area.
With the adoption of Multitouch Technologies in Advertising, instead of pushing Ads to the end user, the user can “PULL” the information for themselves. User identifies themselves to the screens and based on their preferences, a set of content which is suitable for them will be then presented to them. No other mediums apart from MT screens can accomplish this.
NUITEQ’s CIO Jon Chee was recently asked to present this new technology to a group of very influential advertising firms in the Global Region.
“New Technology is always scary to adopt anywhere. In the events and advertising world, as a flash collateral, MT adoption is fairly easily to push forth as the machines will seem “cool” at the roadshow or product launch. However, justification for its long term deployment and utilization is harder to push. We have to demonstrate to the main stakeholders, the quantification of touch. How often an advert was touched? How was it interacted upon? Which message appealed more, and how readily can the content be changed real time to suit the environment? Snowflake is truly the best tool for all the above. At this conference, the stakeholders’ eyes were opened and I predict that this will be a phenomenal market for us in the coming years ahead” , said NUITEQ’s CIO Mr. Jonathan Chee of the NUITEQ Asia office in Singapore.
Image: Screenshot of the wide range of applications that come with Snowflake 1.9.3, that are suitable for different usage scenarios such as entertainment, education, exhibitions, presentations and others.
I’ll comment below on several of the changes in 1.9.3:
* Added Windows 7 WM_TOUCH events support to TouchCore
* Added support for automatic switch between Snowflake and mouse driver (TouchCore)
The above two features were often requested by our clients and partners, to improve the total experience of their rear camera based multi-touch tables, bars and walls.
* Added mouse support in Windows 7 version (press ‘M’ on keyboard)
Until recently, you needed a touch screen connected to your pc, in order to experience Snowflake. We received many requests from people that didn’t have a touch screen connected to their pc, but still wanted to try out Snowflake. So we included this feature, to support them.
* Changed the corner menus to toggle mode
After extensive field testing of Snowflake in public spaces by NUITEQ and after indexing feedback from clients and partners, we concluded that there was still space for improvement on the interaction design level.
We want to introduce and educate new ways of interacting with touch screens, however there is still a steep learning curve when it comes to this topic, as people for years have learned the typical WIMP-based interaction with computer systems.
So for example, previously in order to use the corner menus in Snowflake, you had to hold, drag and release your finger to select a task. However this way of interacting was not evident to people that are new to touchscreen interaction, because of the fact that they are used to the WIMP-based interaction.
Of course, after you demonstrate the “hold, drag and release”, people easily grasp it and are able to easily reproduce this task, however we want to strive for interaction with touchscreens, that do not require any instructions (from people on the side or on screen) and are therefore as intuitive as possible.
Therefore we have now supported 3 different ways of interaction with the corner menu, so regardless of how they interact with it, they are able to execute their task.
- hold, drag and finger up (1 finger)
- hold and select with another finger (2 fingers)
- tap and select (1 finger)
* Improved interaction in 3D Viewer
Based on our field test research results, we concluded that people are not yet so familiar with interactions such as press and hold. Therefore we replaced that action with a simple tap, in order to select objects in the 3D Viewer.
* Improved PDF Viewer interaction (zoom gesture instead of double tap)
Having mentioned the above in regards to WIMP-interaction, it is interesting to see that not in all cases people expect Windows alike interaction, but actually expect the “new” gesture based interaction to execute a specific task.
So for example in a typical Windows environment, you maximize a window by double tapping it. We thought that this typical action would also translate to our PDF Viewer application, where a person can double tap a PDF to maximize it. However during our field testing, we concluded that people hardly use the double tap action, but rather try the zooming gesture in order to try and maximize the PDF.
Therefore based on our field test results, we have improved this in Snowflake accordingly.
* Improved support for portrait mode
In the digital signage market, displays are often used in vertical setups. As multi-touch technology will find massive adoption in the interactive digital signage market and since several of our partners are active in this industry, we have integrated support for portrait mode.
Other changes to Snowflake 1.9.3 include:
* Reduced Map loading time
* Added new 3D models for retail usage scenarios
* Added new graphics to Tap
* Fixed a crash issue when audio drivers haven’t been installed
* Improved the loading time for unicode fonts
* Improved Configuration Editor
* General bug fixes and improvements
For a complete list of all the improvements that we have made to Snowflake in over 2 years, check out the Change log history on our Support Wiki here.
You can download a free evaluation version of Snowflake Suite 1.9.3 here. Check it out and let us know what you think. Your feedback is important to us, in order for us to improve the product and offer you and your clients a better experience.
Want to avoid losing your top 3 customers to your competition? Want to increase customer loyalty? Are you exploring to increase your company’s sales? Let us know and we’ll explain how we can help to solve these problems for you.
In addition to our off the shelf multi-touch software product Snowflake Suite, we customize multi-touch software solutions to fit companies’ their exact needs.
Please support NUITEQ and Snowflake, by nominating us in the category Best Touch Interface for the Crunchies 2010.
Multitouch software developer, custom multitouch software provider, multitouch application development, touchscreen software, multitouch software suite and platform/framework
Working with multitouch technology since Fall 2006. Thats right, before the iPhone existed ;)
By Harry van der Veen
CEO of pioneering multitouch
software developer NUITEQ
