Some years ago I had one of those big life-changing moments and decided that human computer interaction is the field of computer science that I will from now on be very keen about. I really do not know a reason for this change of heart ... probably had to do something with all the blinking and sparkling of those fancy new interfaces we hear so much about but then never see them available in stores.

And then for a long long time there was nothing. I mean, I was very very keen about HCI, praising every new invention in the field but that was about it. I was just a passive observer. Until one summer day a few months ago when I was again admiring a HCI hype of the recent years: multitouch displays. A lot of those displays were made by people at the universities all over the world ... so the know-how had to be published somewhere. I dug a bit further but not much lower indeed ... suddenly I realized that there is a massive amount of information available ... it was almost as there was a multitouch subculture within HCI field. And the whole damn thing was apparently not even that expensive to make.

Therefore I have proposed an idea to my old lab at the faculty - the Laboratory for Computer Graphics and Multimedia. Besides my good relations with the lab I think that it is also the most suitable place at the faculty for such a project. My idea was to build a multitouch surface with lab's founding and then offer it to students to develop some cool applications for it at such courses as computer graphics. The project was approved and I even got a friend of mine who works at the lab to work with me on it (therefore from now on it is not my project but rather our project ... mine was just the initiative).

Why writing about it here? Well first thing is that I don't have anything else to write. Then there is apparently a some kind of unwritten rule in the subculture that I have mentioned before (just kidding, but there are really many blogs about this out there). And third reason: perhaps we will encounter into some problems and document them so that somebody else will have easier time trying to build a similar thing. Actually I am writing this post with at least a week delay ... we have already started working ... and already encountered some problems. What kind? Well, more about this in the next posts (there are at least eight more planned).