Today at iPod event in San Francisco Apple has released another multitouch device so called iPod Touch which is of course iPhone without a phone and digital camera.

Features:

• Thinner than the iPhone – only 8mm
• Same multitouch pinch & spread zooming controls for photos as the iPhone
• Same coverflow as the iPhone
• 3.5″ diagonal screen
• Wi-Fi 802.11b & 802.11g – it can save your home network setup
• Home button
• Slide to unlock – same as the iPhone
• Sensor for auto-landscape viewing
• Safari – connect to the internet via WiFi
• YouTube via WiFi
• 22 hours audio, 5 hours video playback
• 8GB – $299
• 16GB – $399

Check out also new iPod nano (video support and new interface) and new iPod classic with 80 gb and 160 gb hard drives.

Nice comparison of all new iPods can be found here

By the way here are some screenshots of the latest build of Leopard 10.5 (I like the screen sharing feature build-in)

And one more thing the iPhone have received a price drop, moving the 8GB model down to $399 from $599 and the 4GB iPhone model is being dropped. So now the 8GB iPhone is now only $100 more than the new iPod touch model at the same storage capacity.

Watch the keynote presentation here.

I didn’t have opportunity to watch this interview anytime before (I just didn’t know about it ) even tho it’s from May. I would like to share with you my thoughts after watching it. Not always we can see both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates seating next to each other and being interviewed.

The most interesting parts from the multitouch and natural user interface point of view (the one that I’m more interested in) are only those 3:

• part 6/9 Bill Gates talks about natural user interface and 3d apps, virtual world
• part 7/9 Steve Jobs talks about post-pc devices
• part 9/9 Bill Gates talks about natural user interface for seniors

But I would really recommend to watch all the parts, it’s worth it to see how Steve and Bill see the future of computing.

It seems that not only Jeff Han and other multitouch related company’s think about natural user interface. But also big players like Microsoft with surface computing or Apple with iPhone and probably future multitouch apps maybe OS are trying to add and invent something in this field too.

It also seems that for Bill Gates the real future of computing is in natural user interface and 3d applications, 3d enviroments like virtual worlds where people can collaborate with each other. I’m not going to talk about it this post, but I hope I will come back to this topic in near future. I just want to point out that natural user interface and 3d seems to be the future of human-computer interaction.

What I also like is what Steve and Bill are saying about passion to what you are doing in your life (part 8/9). So that “You have to have a lot of passion for what you are doing and reason for that is because it’s so hard so that if you don’t any rational person would give up”. I totally agree with what Steve is saying and I wish that to anyone: to have a passion to something you work on in whatever field you are working on.

Ok that is a long post :-) That’s all for now. You can watch the interview videos below. Enjoy.

Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, D5 Part 1 of 9

Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, D5 Part 2 of 9

Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, D5 Part 3 of 9

Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, D5 Part 4 of 9

Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, D5 Part 5 of 9

Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, D5 Part 6 of 9

Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, D5 Part 7 of 9

Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, D5 Part 8 of 9

Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, D5 Part 9 of 9

You can also find more good interviews from D5 Conference here.

Below you can find some of the OpenTouch testing demo videos I made sometime ago. The QuickTime movies have good quality but some of them have low fps, because of my screen capturing software (that will change in future). Enjoy the videos and let me know what you think.

OpenTouch – FTIR Blob Detection algorithm test
http://opentouch.info/tmp/OpenTouchFTIR.mov

OpenTouch – Blob Detection using ffmpeg for video input
http://opentouch.info/tmp/ffmpegBlobDetection.mov

OpenTouch – Simple OSC sender and Processing app
http://opentouch.info/tmp/OpenTouchSimpleOSC.mov

OpenTouch – TUIO sender and Processing drawing app
http://opentouch.info/tmp/OpenTouchTUIO.mov

OpenTouch – Quartz Composer Particle System using TUIO cursor custom patch
http://opentouch.info/tmp/OpenTouchParticleSystemQC.mov

OpenTouch – Quartz Composer Explosion using TUIO cursor custom patch
http://opentouch.info/tmp/OpenTouchExplosionQC.mov

OpenTouch – some of the demo videos combined together (low quality video at YouTube)

The NUIGroup (Natural User Interfaces Group) website is up and running with blog on the top page and forum where you can find a lot of information about multitouch screens, prototypes, building process reviews, software used etc. Don’t hesitate to drop by and post your comments. If you’re an IRC addict you can find us on #ftir channel at freenode.

I didn’t write about that, but I think it’s time now ;-)

I’m trying to make my own multitouch screen based on technology that Jeff Han describes on his webpage (FTIR effect in acrylic). I know that I’m not the first one ;-) I already have contact with some people that are actually making their multitouch screen or finished it in near past. I will publish some photos of my prototype soon. Right now I’m in the middle of buying all needed elements. Stay tuned for more information about this subject.

Here is the video showing how Jeff’s Han multitouch screen works.