Multi-touch Hardware&Software

Versione stampabile

By Andreas Kopietz, Elektrosil
 
The vast majority of today's touch screens are single touch-oriented and usually emulate the traditional mouse functionality. All manufacturers of touch hardware deliver drivers for different operating systems and, as the mouse functionality is part of all OS, the integration is easy.
 
Multi-touch hardware, though, offers much more and bypasses the old pointer-oriented single-touch functionality. Multi-touch offers a much better user interface, as intuitive gestures are supported and multiple users can interact on the same or different applications on one physical surface. For example, one user could paint a sketch using two or three fingers while another user types something on a virtual keyboard.
 
Windows 7 supports multi-touch functionality, but what does that mean? First of all Win7 supports multiple input devices in parallel. Microsoft made the first steps in this direction with its former operating system, MS Vista. The Microsoft Surface touch table still runs under Vista, powered by a special add-on, the so called Surface SDK which is an augmented version of the WPF 3.5 framework.
 
Having a multiple input device support alone is not enough; the operating system has to be able to support all multi-touch input methods. In Win7, 99% of these functions are already implemented. Win7 supports simple single mouse functions as well as higher level multi-touch functions such as zooming, rotating, and panning or the related panning bounce feedback.
 
Software engineers can write their own software using Visual Studio. The preferred software language for multi-touch under Win7 is C++. Using the WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) framework, which is part of .NET 3.5 and also the upcoming .NET 4.0 framework, engineers can choose between two different options for multi-touch input.
 
WM touch offers software routines that are more touch point-oriented, while WM gesture offers richer software routines such as manipulation and inertia. Manipulation includes, for example, zooming of objects triggered by the input gesture of two touch points that move in opposite directions. Inertia includes a small physics engine that helps the programmer to describe how an object like a window or frame will react when it hits the end of the virtual desktop. This is the so-called panning bounce feedback control.
 
Elektrosil’s multi-touch hardware dreaMTouch supports 100% Win7, so all the upcoming multi-touch software under Win7 runs perfectly and offers a revolutionary new user interface for kiosk solutions of the future.