Hello Umar

[touchhope]

Hello Umar,

On our long way to try to get a software for the Ractiv's Touch Plus device, as a buyer member of our community of backers and buyers provided by Wassim Gharbi (http://gharbi.me/ractiv/), i think we should all thank you so much for your "Code to access video stream for Ractiv Touch+" (https://github.com/umarniz/TouchPlusLib/tree/master).

Indeed, thanks to your code, a backer, Matthew H. Fogle, had tried to build a csharp "Touch+ Camera Application" (https://github.com/shadowmite/TouchPlusCMDR).

Then, Lai Schwe from Ractiv had finally publish his own source code for Ractiv Touch+ Software (https://github.com/Ractiv/touch_plus_source_code/tree/master).

Before the fork version on Github, a 0.55b version (http://pan.baidu.com/s/1pJ0zNfl) was released by Ractiv and a backer Alexandru Bauer did run the software on his computer (see : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulFTmjiwmAA) but dll files (msvcr110.dll and msvcp110.dll or sometimes msvcr120.dll and msvcp120.dll) are missing on main systems (win32 and win64) and not included in Ractiv's installer.

Then we did made some debugging with Lai during few weeks this summer and he made a journey to Singapore to meet Corey Manders at the Institute for Infocomm Research to get help on OSX code.

After announcing in november, that almost every members had been gone at Ractiv, Lai was talking about high pressure and a soon software release because he made great improvments on main algorithm.

Then seeing nothing coming from Lai, ultim8k asked him a full list of: "hardware, lib dependencies, what has been done, what is missing" but got no answer.

So i was thinking of you, to maybe get, if you have a little time to help us, your expert look at actual Lai's code and simply telling us your technical opinion with your knowledge in software development.

Some backers are willing to put money in court action against Ractiv, a company that maybe doesn't exist anymore.

I wonder if for example $30000 would be enough to get a c++ engineer for two or three months to finish the job.

But maybe, there's too much to do at this point to get something running on win32, win64, osx and linux in an so short period.

The initial Ractiv's roadmap was :
(OSX support)
Linux support
SDK (will give you access to images, hand segmentation, and finger coordinates)
Multitouch gestures (pinch to zoom, two-finger scroll)
Table mode (manual calibration on untextured surfaces)
Improved tracking performance
Faster performance (including SSE and GPU acceleration) and lower CPU usage
Gesture learner (so you can teach Touch+ to recognize different gestures to activate different functions)
3D hand model

We saw interesting things on the net (https://github.com/nickgillian/grt
), (https://github.com/OpenGP/htrack), asking ourselves if it could be usefull to get mixed with the Touch+ code.

Well, if you unfortunately got no time for us, it doesn't matter and again thank you for your initial code.

Happy New Year 2016 to you, your family and your friends, Umar !

Sorry for my bad english (i'm a french man).

Best Regards,

Christian LERICHE
also known as "touchhope" and "The Forg" on Wassim's website

[umarniz]

Hi touchhope,

Wow, I didn't know this much has happened since I did that weekend hack on Ractiv. Thank you for such a good breakdown on the situation of things.

I can't promise anything but I will be compiling the code that Lai has done and play around with it in the coming days to see what could be done.

Will keep you guys posted as I have progress on http://gharbi.me/ractiv/

[touchhope]

Ractiv/touch_plus_source_code#35

[touchhope]

Ractiv/touch_plus_source_code#36

[touchhope]

shadowmite/TouchPlusCMDR#2

[touchhope]

Ractiv/TrackPlus_OSX#1

[touchhope]

nickgillian/grt#46

[touchhope]

https://github.com/OpenGP/htrack/issues/17

[touchhope]

Ractiv/touch_plus_source_code#37

shadowmite/TouchPlusCMDR#2

"to make a try to run something on windows, to see only 6 little windows with your fingers moving in realtime for now, just copy turbojpeg.dll file to build folder, after compiling in VS Community 2015, then launch daemon_plus.exe directly from build folder, without modifying any code in fact as soon as your path is without any blank spaces (C:\touch_plus_source_code\build), see : Ractiv/touch_plus_source_code#36"

[touchhope]

Hi Umar

To me, Lai must have had build a kind of debugging console mode that must be disabled somewhere in code to get output on windows interface with win_cursor_plus to get the famous pointing green circle as seen on v0.55b version. Maybe some true or false to change somewhere or part of the code has to be commented or uncommented somewhere.

As you seems to be cleaver on many things Umar, could you explain us, to Matthew and me :

• how to get csharp exe launched from c++ exe ?
• what is udp port and what it stands for in this project ?
• what is the problem of special permit on signed code that Ractiv have to purchase from Microsoft to allow clicking injection on some of elements of new Windows interface ?
• nwjs node webkit https://github.com/nwjs/nw.js, Lai seems to be working on for now, seems to be launching or controlling daemon processes and menus, and drive Lai to kill 3 from 4 default automatically launched processes with tasklist command on processes.cpp : what can you tell us about nwjs ?

Thanks in advance, Umar, if you find a little time and answers to us.

Kind regards,

Christian

[touchhope]

I forgot to tell you that Dr. Andrea Tagliasacchi from Graphics Laboratory @ University of Victoria, Canada http://gfx.uvic.ca/people/ataiya/ is ok, in response to my Hello Anastasia (https://github.com/OpenGP/htrack/issues/17), to try to test his https://github.com/OpenGP/htrack on a unit we would send him.

So I've contacted Lachlan Pollock at touchplus@aussiebroadband.com.au to see if he could find a unit for him, because I've made a publicity, sending about 218 emails to members, to get some for Lacklan's programmer friend on OpenCV, and so he already have contacts.

[umarniz]

Hi touchhope,

I am sorry for not responding earlier on this. I did go through the code for a couple of hours a few weeks back and in its current state it has been left in a debug state where the dev was midway through adding some functionality and has lots of testing code splattered across the code. Secondly the code has very few comments which makes it very hard to understand functionality throughout.

I think for it to be fully functional and usable it would require a lot of time to work on it.

how to get csharp exe launched from c++ exe ?

This part of the code is commented in the code which I was able to run but still wouldn't move the cursor based on my movements. I will see if I can get this working over the weekend so that even with buggy movement end users can have a controllable cursor.

what is udp port and what it stands for in this project ?

UDP is a networking protocol and the touch plus is built with multiple different executable (daemon, gesture recognizer, cursor control) all components talk to each other via UDP.

what is the problem of special permit on signed code that Ractiv have to purchase from Microsoft to allow clicking injection on some of elements of new Windows interface ?

I am guessing this would be for controlling the cursor on windows 8 and above as then the application would need to have a Microsoft certificate to be able to work as an input device.

nwjs node webkit https://github.com/nwjs/nw.js, Lai seems to be working on for now, seems to be launching or controlling daemon processes and menus, and drive Lai to kill 3 from 4 default automatically launched processes with tasklist command on processes.cpp : what can you tell us about nwjs ?

NWJS is a framework to run JavaScript apps on desktops using chrome. I am not sure if the menu application is made using NWJS or directly via flash but it just communicates via UDP with the daemon process which is made in c++ and is part of the project.

[touchhope]

See on http://gharbi.me/ractiv/

" Matthew H. Fogle Backer 57 minutes ago

Ok, I think I see the issue, the release around 7/25/2015 has some code in main.cpp which clearly sends the points over to the cursor app. In the current branch that never happens. Instead code is called into the scopa section which clearly gets the points but never sends them over the udp channel. I'll tinker with adding back in some hybrid routines and see if I get anywhere...
"

[touchhope]

See on : https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/haptix/haptix-multitouch-reinvented/comments

"Matthew Fogle Il y a 29 minutes

You know the really really interesting part? This code base in Github has stubs for pretty much everything they demonstrated in their videos. If I didn't know better I'd assume it looks like they had a working project but then had to change something vastly. Which leads me to the assumption that the etron chip disparity map might have been used in the prototype... Why else would they completely change everything? Even the unity game engine code is here..."