…or in the cellar, because there he waited in my case to be used (after doing some cleaning for sure). With his measures of 60 x 40 cm he fits perfectly into my setup for doing some tests. Always good to have some older stuff down there.
My ceiling is on my floor – impressive!
At first I had to unscrew these ugly retainers.
Then I had to clean the mirror.
“I can see clearly now…”
Wow, that was fast! On monday evening I ordered my piece of EndLighten acrylic and almost 40 hours later I already held it in my hands. Despite the good packaging a piece of few millimeter splintered at one corner, but I think this is not so bad. The main thing is, that the whole rest is unscathed.
The package looks very stable.
And here it is…
…but what is that? That doesn’t look very nice, but I hope it won’t matter.
Yesterday night I finally modified my Sony PS3Eye. At first I removed the infrared blocking filter, following the very vivid video-tutorial from the committed NUI Group member PeauProductions. After a way too long and hard fight I finally got that little bastard out! In between I cut a piece of a old floppy-disc, which I’ll use temporary as a visible blocking filter until my bandpass filter arrives. After this act was done, I was a bit nervous about the functionality of my cam, because some people broke their cams during the modifying. But thankfully my concerns about that weren’t necessary, as you can see on the last picture:
All I need was my PS3Eye, a old floppy-disc and some tools.
These small black things were sitting on the screws at the backside. I needed something sharp to remove them.
After removing I was able to unscrew the backside.
This was the hardest part. The fight lasted severel minutes and in between I was on the brink to give up, but I finally faced it, ha!
After unscrewing the backside of the PS3Eye it looked like this.
In the next step I unscrewd the stand.
After the stand was off, I unscrewed the lens mount.
No, this ain’t Pacman. In the meantime I cut a fitting visible blocking filter into shape.
Before inserting the piece of floppy-disc, I had to win the second round against the PS3Eye. Means, I had to remove the infrared blocking filter and this took me some time, but as you can see on the picture, I finally won!
At the end I screwed the lens mount back on the camera-board.
Currently the picture of my PS3Eye looks like this. As you can see, the camera can’t focus correctly anymore, but according to some threads on NUI Group this seems to be normal. My ordered NIR optical filter will fix this.
…at the end of the tunnel.
Yesterday I ordered one of the last missing parts of my list of materials – my acrylic piece “Plexiglas EndLighten XL” with a thickness of 8 mm. According to some expert opinions, it will be stable enough for my setup and hopefully not sag in combination with my 5 mm thick protection-layer “Plexiglas Studio” (7D006).
A high compliment for the fast and very good advice from the customer service from Evonik/Röhm.
If you’re planing to build a multi-touch-table, there is no way around building a multi-touch-mini before that. Seth Sandler from San Diego showed the multi-touch-community how to do it and many fans followed his example.
Seth Sandler’s tutorial how to build a multi-touch-mini
I also built my mandatory instance and was suprised, how nice such a simple setup works. Of course you can’t compare such a “prototype” with a real multi-touch-table, but it’s an amazing toy for doing the first steps with the topic.
This good ol’ Amazon-cardbox will be the base for my multi-touch-mini.
Cutting the paper for the top
I placed my PS3Eye at an angle of 90 degrees in a half bog roll and taped it on the bottom of the cardbox to fix it.
My first results with the smoke demo
Since I’m a fan of prototyping and a person, who has to see, how things appear in their environment, I’ve build a “rapid” prototype of my table in a couple of hours. I can recommend this approach, because you get a real impression, how your final table will look like and how it will fit into your room or whatever. I spent not more than maybe 20 Euro for the material and some time, but I think it’s worth it.
Here are some pics of the building process and the final prototype:
Workplace #1
Keep your eyes peeled! My dirty little helper, hehe
The bottom has just been finished…
…and here’s the rest
Now the framework will get decorated (as you can see, we already entered workplace #2 – my room)
I used black construction paper for the sides and large sheets of white paper for the top.
Finished prototype in his prospective environment – part 1
Finished prototype in his prospective environment – part 2
Now I know, that my table will be large, but not too large 
On Monday my ordered sheet of “Plexiglas Studio” (7D006) will get shipped. I read about this high class projection and protection material at NUI Group (where else?). It’s the same material, Microsoft uses for the “Surface”.
Here you can see the big brother of the 7D006 – the 7D009 – in action. I don’t think that there will be much difference in quality, but we’ll see.
Inspired by some threads at the NUI Group forum I ordered a very cheap USB webcam from ebay for disassembling. It’s lens mount has the same hole spacing as the original mount from the PS3Eye, so I’m able to mount my new wide angle lens.
…but this is sometimes not enough.
Therefore I just bought a “2.1mm 160-Degree Wide Angle Lens for Security Cameras and Webcams” from dealextreme.com for using with my PS3Eye. They offer free shipping and payment via PayPal without registering at their online-shop. What more do you want?
…or separate the IR light from the visible light.
Therefore I just ordered an “NIR Optical Filter” from the ebayer “omegabob”, who’s meanwhile very popular at the NUI Group forum for his high quality filters. Since I’ll use IR LEDs with a wavelength of 880 nm, I’ve chosen the “880DF20″. The 20 means, that the spektrum of this filter reaches from 880 – 20 nm to 880 + 20 nm, therefore from 860 to 900 nm.
I can only recommend these filters, because they’re produced to perfectly fit into the Sony PS3Eye.