Saturday, August 8, 2009

Introducing Crazy Coins – a Silverlight 3.0 Multi-Touch Application

Ever since I started in this industry I’ve always been searching for new ways to communicate with my software.  A few months ago, I purchased a HP TouchSmart tx2 Tablet.  The primary reason for this purchase was because it had multi-touch capability.  I’ve found a few cool apps to demo the technology, but as a developer, I’m more interested how to program this stuff.  There were a few API’s but they are all pretty much workarounds to allow programming against the new hardware with existing technologies.  I wasn’t all that interested in learning something that is going to become obsolete once the built in technologies are released.  In early July 2009 Microsoft launched Silverlight 3.0.  Silverlight 3.0 provides native support for multi-touch.  This was what I was waiting for.  I had a few hours over a weekend so it was time to build something.  I wanted to come up with something easy to build so I went for a run (where most of my great ideas come from) and came up with Crazy Coins.  The concept for the game was simple, a center launcher which is a ATM that shoots coins up in the air and have two remote control piggy banks that can catch the coins as the fall back to the ground.  I’ve always been very intrigued by the Farseer physics engine, so having some sort of app where the coins interact with each other and gravity was a great fit.  The thing that makes this game Multi-Touch is the ability to move each piggy bank on either side of the ATM simultaneously by dragging them with your fingers.

Here are some links associated with this project.

-ec

3 comments:

  1. Kevin: Trying to get your Crazy Coins multi-touch demo to work on our Win7 cpu with 3M Multi-touch display and it's not recognizing touch. Have downloaded Silverlight to no avail. Any thoughts?

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  2. Tholt - I've only tried this on a couple HP TouchSmarts (a laptop and desktop) it worked fine on both of those.

    If you are a developer you might look at my previous post that describes how MultiTouch works.

    I think this technology is really young so I'm not suprised it may not work on all platforms.

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  3. I saw mention of touch not responding in FireFox browser. Try it in IE to see if the result if different.

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