touchEarth

You might remember Pawel from Episode Seven of the Summer of Code podcast or his tech talk on his 2007 project with WinLibre, OpenTouch. We already knew Pawel was rocking and rolling on all things open source, as he was kind enough to put together a page collating statistics from the Google Higly Open Participation Contest using the new Google Chart API. What we didn't know was that he's also the co-founder of the Natural User Interface Group, a community working on different multi-touch screen technologies. The NUI Group develops open source software like touchlib, OpenTouch and the TouchAPI. The community has more than 1000 members worldwide, all of them sharing their experiences with building their own multi-touch screens in the project's forums and IRC channel.


So what is Pawel up to when he's not tracking stats for GHOP or doing NUI community management? Hacking on touchEarth, an application he developed that allows you to control Google Earth using two finger gestures on multi-touch table. touchEarth uses the Google Earth COM API to control some of Google Earth's features, while all the multi-touch screen events are sent to touchEarth from touchlib (or OpenTouch) using the TUIO protocol. Sound cool? Check out the demo video.

Are you performing cool feats of open sourcery? Post a comment and get in touch!

Showcasing Summer of Coders Around the World

We've created a KML file (requires Google Earth) showcasing our successful 2007 student participants. The file will show you the global connections made between students and their mentors, and we have to say the results look pretty sweet.

Check it out and let us know what you think!