XNA and multitouch - xna

I use XNA to develop small 2D games. The user should have the ability to interact with the game by using the mutli touch gestures in Windows 7. I want the same multi touch functionality in XNA as WPF provides. Are there any frameworks or built-in features?

As you probably already know, the XNA touch API does not work on Windows, only on Windows Phone.
This blog post explains why and also lists some methods for getting touch input working.

Try reading this code sample about touch-based textures for WP7, it can be useful for what you want.
http://create.msdn.com/en-US/education/catalog/sample/gestures

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A-Frame: FOSS Options for widely supported, markerless AR?

A-Frame's immersive-ar functionality will work on some Android devices I've tested with, but I haven't had success with iOS.
It is possible to use an A-Frame scene for markerless AR on iOS using a commercial external library. Example: this demo from Zapworks using their A-Frame SDK. https://zappar-xr.github.io/aframe-example-instant-tracking-3d-model/
The tracking seems to be no where near as good as A-Frame's hit test demo (https://github.com/stspanho/aframe-hit-test), but it does seem to work on virtually any device and browser I've tried, and it is good enough for the intended purpose.
I would be more than happy to fallback to lower quality AR mode in order to have AR at all in devices that don't support immersive-ar in browser. I have not been able to find an A-Frame compatible solution for using only free/open source components for doing this, only commercial products like Zapworks and 8th Wall.
Is there a free / open source plugin for A-Frame that allows a scene to be rendered with markerless AR across a very broad range of devices, similar to Zapworks?
I ended up rolling my own solution which wasn't complete, but good enough for the project. Strictly speaking, there's three problems to overcome with getting a markerless AR experience on mobile without relying on WebXR:
Webcam display
Orientation
Position
Webcam display is fairly trivial to implement in HTML5 without any libraries.
Orientation is already handled nicely by A-FRAME's "magic window" functionality, including on iOS.
Position was tricky and I wasn't able to solve it. I attempted to use the FULLTILT library's accelerometer functions, and even using the readings with gravity filtered out I wasn't able to get a high enough level of accuracy. (It happened that this particular project did not need it)

Augmented Reality Mask using Facial Recognition on Xbox Kinect with Kinect for Windows SDK

I am using an XBox Kinect with the Kinect for Windows SDK. I want to make an application that will augment a 3D mask (a 3D model of a mask made in 3DS Max) onto the face of anyone using the application. The application will be used in an exhibit locally. I have not tried much because I don't know where to start. So what I want to know is, is it currently possible to augment a 3DS Max model onto a live video stream using the facial recognition and skeletal tracking features in the newest Kinect for Windows SDK, and if so, how/where should I start trying to do/implement this? Any point in the right direction would be great. Thank you! PS And yes, I have read the UI guidelines and the facial documentation. My problem is one of not knowing where to start programming, not one of not understanding the fundamental concepts. Thanks!
If you are serious about getting into developing for the Kinect I would recommend getting this book:
http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Kinect-Windows-Software-Development/dp/0735666814
This goes through developing with the Kinect for Windows SDK from the ground up. There is a face tracking and an augmented reality example so I'm pretty sure you will be able to achieve your goal quite easily.
All the code from the book is here:
http://kinecttoolbox.codeplex.com/
Alternatively, there is an example here which pretty much is what you want to achieve:
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/213034/Kinect-Getting-Started-Become-The-Incredible-Hulk
It is developed using the Beta version of the SDK, but the same priciples apply.
You can also check out the quick start videos here:
http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/KinectQuickstart
In summary, based on my own experience, I would spend some time going through the beginner examples either in the vides or the book (I found the book very good) just to get familiar with how to setup a simple Kinect project and how the different parts of the SDK work.
When you have developed some throwaway apps with the Kinect, I would then try tackling your project (although, the Incredible Hulk project above should get you most the way there!)
Best of luck with your project

Running a XNA game in a ruby on rails website

I was wondering if there is any way of running a 2D game built in XNA in a website built using ruby on rails. I am familiar with both languages, XNA more than ruby.
I can make a game in a fairly short amount of time, and i need to make one for a website, but i would rather use a language that i am familiar with to do this. If not is there any suggestions of languages/engines/game creating tools that i can use to build a simple 2D game that will be featured on a website?
I am a experienced in programming, i know advance programming techniques so any suggestions are fine.
Thank you
Ruby on Rails is a server-side framework. XNA is a client-side framework. They don't really interoperate - nor do they need to.
You can make a 2D XNA game run in a Silverlight 3 or 4 plugin using ExEn. You could also use Silverlight 5, which has a 3D API and audio API that matches XNA, and has a toolkit available that adds 2D XNA functionality like SpriteBatch and more, making the majority of the XNA API available. You then simply embed the Silverlight control in your HTML.
A regular XNA game (ie: using the official library) is an executable that would have to be downloaded from your website.

ExEn (XNA -> iOS, Android) and accelerometers, etc

I've been reading about Andrew Russell's ExEn project and I'm wondering what the flow would be like for creating a WP7 accelerometer-based game and then porting it to another platform, say iOS. Here's what I hope would happen:
Create fully functional game in XNA, avoiding dependance on device
specific items like the 'back' button.
Run the project through ExEn (I have no idea on how this would
happen), creating fully functional iOS game.
Run game on iPhone.
Sorry for that pitiful outline, but I just don't have a solid high-level view after reading about it.
Also, being software conversion, surely it wouldn't totally work. How would you iron out the wrinkles? I assume you'd have to know iOS or Android fairly well to pin it down.
Anyway, if anyone can move me one step closer I would appreciate it.
ExEn is an implementation of a subset of the XNA API that runs on different platforms (including iOS and Android). Put simply, it makes the classes and methods that you use when writing XNA code available to you on these other platforms. (Plus appropriate instructions, examples, etc.)
When using ExEn, the bulk of your code should simply "just work". However in most real-world cases you will need to write at least some platform-specific code (and probably provide some platform-specific assets). In particular to support different device resolutions, and also in cases where you use XNA features not available in ExEn.
At time of writing, ExEn does not implement the XNA/WP7 APIs for accelerometer support. At some time in the future they may be added (either by me or anyone who wants to contribute a patch). ExEn is distributed as source code, so you could even add the necessary support yourself.
The alternative would be to write platform-specific code for the parts of your game that query the accelerometer. Using ExEn does not prevent you from also using the APIs of the underlying platform.
ExEn (on iOS and Android) runs on top of Xamarin's MonoTouch and Mono for Android products. These two products provide C# bindings for the underlying platform APIs. Also, much like ExEn implements the XNA APIs, Mono implements the .NET APIs. These products also provide you with the tools you need (IDE, compiler, debugger, etc).
So the iOS API that you would use is UIAccelerometer (doc). This is exposed in C# via MonoTouch.UIKit.UIAccelerometer (doc). I'll leave looking up the Android equivalents as an exercise.
You can't expect:
porting a game to other platform and don't modify it.
porting a game with special platform inherent abilities to other platform that lacks this abilities, or vice versa

Delphi Components for Face Identification and Tagging

Are there any good components, free or commercial, available for Delphi (I use Delphi 2009) that will allow me to easily implement face detection and tagging of the faces in photos (i.e. graphics/images)?
I need to do something similar to what Google Picasa's Web Albums can do, but from within my application.
Did you see the SDK's that come in the answer Face recognition Library.
The one from nuerotechnology has an activex component that you could use.
Here is what you wanted
http://delphimagic.blogspot.com/2011/08/reconocimiento-de-caras-con-delphi.html

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