The Technograph

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This year’s Engineering Open House raised the bar for student projects once again. One project in particular, reigning from the Siebel Center for Computer Science, took home both the Best Undergraduate Research Award and the Lockheed Martin Award for Computer Science. The project is called Tacchi, named after the word for “touch” in Japanese, is a table-sized multi-touch screen that is designed to be operated simultaneously by multiple users. Its concept was inspired by a similar project called Reactable which is a multi-touch table designed as a contemporary musical instrument. Tacchi was built by the SIGmusic component of the University’s Association for Computing Machinery, a student organization based in the Department of Computer Science.

Construction for Tacchi began at the beginning of the year, continuing until just hours before EOH, when the device became fully operational. It works by using laser planes above an LCD television. The lasers light up your fingers when you touch the screen, and cameras embedded behind the screen detect the light. Team member R.J. Marsan said that he experimented with various designs and built three other touch screens before finalizing the design for Tacchi. “One of the most difficult parts was the programming,” said Marsan, “because the device is such a unique piece of hardware.” Some simple applications were written for demonstration at EOH which were very successful, but concepts for new software are in the works. Overall, Tacchi was one of the most talked about exhibits and demonstrated some of the more innovative projects from the world-renowned department.

Tacchi, as a device, has a lot of potential in the digital music industry. The multi-touch interface is ideal for creating music because of its natural feel. It can be used without external hardware (like a piano keyboard) to create music. The goal of Tacchi is to be a complete music solution: to have the ability to create complete songs in real-time without the need for additional instruments.

Tacchi will continue to be developed for future open houses and further development. “Our whole group feels like this is an investment.  We were given an opportunity to pursue our passion, and we all hope it will result in a lot of opportunities in the future.” That future is still to be decided, but for now the team is working on writing new and interesting applications for Tacchi to be fully utilized.

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