08 Tech Tuesday – Pulse IR Touch Screen

In our lobby we have a new multi-touch touch screen, based on Pulse IR. I will describe a little about the technology and the protocol that it uses to communicate Multi-touch information.

The LCD Screen
It is a 42″ 1920 x 1080 LCD panel made by NEC, with a PulsIR touch overlay that was created by a Korean Manufacturer and distributed by IDSPulse and integrated by TSI Touch. The panel and touch overlay comes to roughly $2500, which is a crazy competitive price.

Detailed info on PulseIr is given on the IDSPulse website, but essentially is a row of infrared LEDs around the edge which match up with a IR detector on the other side and detect when an IR beam is broken. This technology supports non-finger contact such as stylus, glove, etc and is quite durable as there is no film on the surface. You can check out a bunch of videos showcasing PulseIr technology on RND Pulse’s Youtube Chanel. The current driver seems like it could be a little more robust in options but seems to be very stable. You can do mouse up and down and drag, but I have not found a way to just move the mouse with out a click and drag which would be a nice option. The current implementation supports up to 6 simultaneous touches and uses the TUIO protocol.

The TUIO protocol is an open framework that acts to connect multi-touch information to different development platforms such as Open Frameworks, Processing, Cinder, Python, Flash, Objective C…. etc. It is used often in video tracking of multiple objects in space and can communicate information about fiducially.

There is a processing app in the doc that is a sample app from the TUIO library for processing that lets you play with the multitouch.