Natural User Interface Group

Web Page: http://gsoc.nuigc.com/about/ideas

Mailing List: http://groups.google.com/group/nuigroup-gsoc

Established in 2006, The Natural User Interface Group is an open source community that creates and shares interaction techniques & standards that benefit designers & developers throughout the world. We offer a collaborative environment for scientists that are interested in learning and developing modern Human/Computer Interaction methods and concepts. Our research includes topics such as: computer vision, touch computing, voice & gesture recognition, and experience design and information visualization. With over 15,000 members, our goals is to accelerate the exploration of sensing solutions and interaction scenarios, thus allowing us to find the most effective methods of constructing modern interface devices. Our members are a worldwide gathering of students, researchers, designers, developers and engineers all who share a similar passion for the creation and distribution of open systems. An important aspect is to create and utilize open standards that allow development to flourish. 

Projects

• CCV 2.0 Moving CCV towards the version 2.0 with customizable pipeline.
• CCVMultiplexer The new module allows running multiple instances of CCV over the network and the combining all the tracked data as well as calibration data. It will also help in projecting multiple screens over a large projection surface without the need of a multi-head video cards to project the screen using multiple projectors.
• Computational Photography Processing Tools Computational Photography is an exciting new area at the intersection of Computer Graphics and Computer Vision. Through the use of computation, its goal is to move beyond the limitations of conventional photography to produce enhanced and novel imagery of the world around us. Computational photography refers broadly to computational imaging techniques that enhance or extend the capabilities of digital photography. The output of these techniques is an ordinary photograph, but one that could not have been taken by a traditional camera.
• Moving CCV Forward - A Solid Foundation This project's goal is to finish designing and implementing the second version of NUI's Community Core Vision project, CCV2. The major architectural changes that set CCV2 apart from its predecessor are a modular, multithreaded architecture and a focus on extensibility and configurability. This will yield performance improvements for current applications, and also greatly increase the utility and ease of use of CCV. The application will also be separated into parts, a GUI/configuration client and a services daemon, that communicate through a well-defined API. This split configuration opens the door to implementations that vary for different client enviroments (different GUI's), and also enables the daemon to be run on a different machine from the client. Perhaps most importantly, CCV2 will lay a more robust foundation for continued research in Natural User Interfaces.
• Open Source Infrared Frame This document details the proposal of a project to the NUI Group (Natural User Interface) for the Google Summer of Code, 2012 edition. The project's goal is to create easily scaled open source infrared multi-touch frame in order to let people build their own frames and develop further projects using this information. Cost of existing infrared frames with true multitouch support is quite overvalued in comparison to summary cost of the components. With open source frame, this situation can be changed, due to growth of competition between independent manufacturers. And, ideally, will bring significant decrease of cost for this frames, and, as a result, cost of devices, that use this technology.