So touch, the newborn creative multi-touch company (so-touch.com), has this summer collaborated with onedotzero (onedotzero.com), the famous London based contemporary, digital arts organization, to design and develop the most creative and fully featured multi-touch application ever created as of today.

The application, hosted at the BFI Southbank in London for 7 days, ran at 40fps on a Mindstorm Aurora table (mindstorm.com) and offered a new, interactive way to explore the onedotzero 2009 festival programme. The whole application has been designed, developed and tested in only 3 weeks by the So touch team, leveraging the unique So touch Flash AS3 multi-touch framework.

This multi-touch multi-user search engine, allows an unlimited number of users to filter the festival programme at the same time, aggregating keywords from 3 different categories: time of the day (morning, afternoon, evening), days of the festival (Wednesday to Sunday), type of performance (Screenings, Feature films, Talks, etc.).

A typical search is performed by dragging and dropping keywords to create a personal search disc where keywords-associated results are displayed. For example, aggregating keywords as Screening + Monday + Afternoon, display the list of screenings on Monday afternoon.

Thanks to the physics rules integrated into the So touch Flash AS3 framework, the personal search discs, could shock and bumped into each other favouring social interactions between users.

Description panel for each event includes: timing, description, pictures and videos that can all be manipulated with multi touch gestures, as well as, the ability to invite a friend or remind themselves about an event, sending event-related emails.

Also, the table featured the ability to consult information about onedotzero and So touch, and to register to their respective newsletters, using a scalable keyboard.

Using the TUIO protocol, this application can run on most of the current multi-touch hardware and being completely administrable through xml, it can be easily customized for any other festival, show or salon. For more information, please get in touch at contact [at] so-touch [dot] com.

Concepting and development by So touch.
Art direction: Alex Le Guillou boplbopl.com.