Multi-touch Screens in the Open Source World

Multi-touch is a new way of human computer interaction, which recognizes multiple simultaneous touch points, as opposed to the standard touchscreen, which recognizes only one touch point at a time. There are many forms of natural input in order to simplify the way people interact with their PC's and devices, however with the introduction of Apple iPhone/iPod Touch, Microsoft Surface and other devices, multi-touch is becoming more and more popular. In this tech talk I will describe what is the history behind multi-touch screens, what kind of multi-touch devices are available and how do they work, focusing mostly on FTIR and DI technique. We will discuss how to receive multi-touch events in our applications using TUIO protocol and how to write multi-touch applications using just a simulator. We will look into available open source projects that can be used to operate multi-touch screens and that are being developed by Natural User Interface Group (NUI Group) community.

Speaker: Pawel Solyga
Pawel Solyga is a computer science student at Politechnika Wroclawska, Poland. He is a co-founder of Natural User Interface Group (NUI Group), whose main areas of interest are modern user interfaces and in particular mutli-touch sreens. Pawel is also a former Google Summer of Code student. For GSoC 2008, he's working as organization administrator and mentor for the NUI Group. When not contributing to Open Source projects, he's a software engineer at Natural User Interface Europe AB, working on innovative multitouch applications.

Google Tech Talks
June 9, 2008