Argos was an open-source GUI builder for multi-touch tabletops. Originally a research project at CalArts, most of the developmental work was sponsored by my tenure with the Natural User Interface Group (NUI Group, Inc) as part of the 2010 Google Summer of Code. Previously working on several other multi-touch environments, I was particularly interested in how surfaces mediated group collaboration in art and music creation-based applications. While not quite as friendly as the circular Reactable, the square-form factor of CalArt's multi-touch table fared well with group-minded experiments and served as the developmental platform for Argos.

Argos was developed with two uses in mind: a reusable multi-touch widget toolkit and an accompanying interface builder for the rapid prototyping of surface interfaces. Interfaces could be used to directly control other applications (via OSC), or act as a GUI layer on top of more complex applications. The builder aspect was designed to explore ways in which multiple participants could simultaneously use and design their own interfaces on different areas of the surface while controlling artistic applications or installations.

In experiments after the initial publication, I developed a real-time drawing application (based on the idea of recursive shapes) with a number of configurable settings so participants could map widgets to parameters they wanted to control. The results of these tests revealed that approximately 3 users could comfortably collaborate before issues of space and artistic direction became overwhelming -- "They left the band citing artistic differences." These tests intrigued me to pursue shared creative environments on a larger scale, although I felt limited by the necessity of a multi-touch surface and the likelihood that similar systems wouldn't see widespread adoption in the immediate future. At the same time, the Argos codebase proved too lengthy to port to mobile devices and was ultimately mothballed. Several keys idea about synchronicity and 'collaborativeness' were later refactored into my 2011 project, Netpixl.