FAQ
After some of the press coverage we've got regarding the room I thought I'd put up some answers to some of the more frequent questions we've received. If there's something that's not covered by all mean get in touch and we'll see if we can get an answer to you, this will likely be a growing list!
"So what's so novel about the room?"
A: As a lot of people know multi-touch technology is nothing new, in fact it's been going since at least the early 80's. People really started to take notice in 2006 with Jeff Hann's work and then interest exploded with the introduction of the iPhone in 2007. People have since been building their own interactive surfaces an playing around with new UI's and several research labs have sprung up as well. What the Future Meeting Room brings is a robust, real-world working prototype of a multi-surface, multi-user, multi-orientation, multi-touch environment. This is a functioning space first and a research space second, and as such everything has to work together in an integrated, seamless and intuitive way. As I often say, technology itself is irrelevant what it lets us do is what matters. What's novel about the room is how all the technologies, both digital and analogue, have been integrated and work together to enhance the user experience for collaborative meetings.
"£150,000 seems a lot of money for a table"
A: Yep, it would be! The entire room project has a budget of £150,000, of which the actual technology hardware is about 40% of the cost. The rest of the costs are associated with University overheads, building and maintenance work, software and development.
"Still, you can construct a multitouch table for not much over £100 - excluding the projector and PC obviously."
A: Very true, I did this myself about 2 years ago. It wasn't very good, in fact I broke it within an hour by leaning on it. As with most things, you get what you pay for. When you're looking to implement robust, long term technology research platforms you simply can't knock things together on the cheap. Why? Because they break. This is a functioning meeting room as well as a research platform for the faculty. Putting in a £100 table built with bits from B & Q would last an hour, this needs to work with little or no maintenance for 3 years.
"The software is open source, PC's are dirt cheap and projectors really are not that expensive now."
A: Obviously there's more to multi-touch than basic blob detection for which some software is open source whilst some isn't. Then there's the various architectures for making use of the TUIO streams. We're working with the developers of pyMT very closely, but we're providing our students with a multitude of development platforms, some open source some commercial. We're providing development opportunities on all platforms as well which leads to further software costs. Yes you can build a functional PC for £200, but you get what you pay for in robustness, performance and lifetime of useful service. Same with projectors for the table, high lumen, long life short throw projectors are not cheap. What is cheap are cheap projectors, they're cheap because they're low res and low lumen.
"Interactive white board, this was done YEARS ago."
A: Again, very true, but in our experience they tend to be integrated into real world work flow pretty poorly. The room is not necessarily about using all new technology, rather it's about using appropriate digital technologies to enhance collaborative practice and augment current and future activities. To this end analogue technology like notebooks and writing on the wall are being captured digitally and shared intuitively. We're not claiming to have invented the wheel, but we do hope that we've combined a number of digital resources to work novelly, coherently, powerfully, intuitively and robustly together for real world use and as a long term research platform for the students and staff.