Iowa State University's Virtual Reality Applications Center (VRAC) is developing a multitouch API for enabling users to create multi-touch applications easily on a variety of hardware platforms. The API supports custom hardware drivers and is platform independent.

Gesture Server: The Sparsh-UI Gesture Server is the main piece of the application. It handles gesture processing and passes touchpoints and/or gesture information to the client application. The Gesture Server supports basic gestures such as drag, scale, and rotate, and is extensible to support an infinite number of user-written custom gestures.

Input Device Driver: A device driver is needed for a device to communicate with the Gesture Server. The Touchtable team at VRAC has developed device drivers for an optical FTIR system, an infrared bezel, as well as several other devices. The driver should be capable of passing touchpoint iformation to the Gesture Server.

Gesture Adapter: A client adapter is needed for each GUI framework the Gesture Server intends to communicate with. The Touchtable team at VRAC is currently working on a Java Swing adapter, with plans to implement other frameworks in the near future.

For information about using Sparsh-UI, join our sparsh-ui developer group from the link on the right-hand side of this page, or contact Stephen Gilbert at (gilbert at iastate dot edu).