OpenCV

OpenCV is open source technology from intel that is designed for video processing. While I don't understand it in anyway meaningful, or how to apply it, what I have seen people do with it is amazing. The specifics of OpenCV are outside the scope of this blog, but the important thing is you need it for multitouch. Probably intel created it as another way to attract developers to intel's chips, so if you happen to be running an IBM powerpc processor you would be dumb to think you could run it. Fortunately, the internet caters to the dumb almost as well as the intelligent, and after discovering darwinports and a gui to run it, I could discard all the recent knowledge about compiling from source and cmake and whatever else I was attempting and have the software figure out to install it. More on that in the next post.

OpenCV was sort of the turning point for me. At first it was the impassable obstacle, but because I was getting stuck there I kept trying to learn about the options for the software that I needed to actually run the table. It was a great learning experience, but ultimately unnecessary.

Now that I am much further along and have abandoned touchlib altogether, I'm not sure it's even needed. But I'll try to recreate the process of installing it anyway in the next post.