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Simple Multi-Touch Toolkit

While multi-touch computing becomes more common, there comes a requirement for students to learn how to create software for multi-touch environments.  Although there are many powerful toolkits that exist already, they require a strong programming background and thus become difficult to integrate into fast-paced human-computer interaction (HCI) courses or for non-CS students to use.  Researchers at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT) and the University of Waterloo (UW) have developed a toolkit with a simplified API called the Simple Multi-Touch Toolkit (SMT).

Based around the concept of touch-enabled zones, SMT is built as a library for the popular processing platform or as a standalone Java library.  By integrating with Processing’s simplified syntax, SMT makes prototyping multi-touch applications fast and easy.   SMT natively supports TUIO and works on Windows Touch but also provides a multi-touch simulator to support non-touch enabled environments.  While SMT was designed to support students and used in undergraduate HCI courses at both UOIT and UW in experimenting with multi-touch input, SurfNet researchers have also used SMT to develop several applications.

The project’s main website is located here at http://vialab.science.uoit.ca/smt/

Check out our GitHub Repository for source code related to this project.

Publications

  • Sikes, K., Cook, Z., Paluka, E., Hancock, M., & Collins, C. (2016). The Simple Multi-Touch Toolkit. In F. Maurer (Ed.), SurfNet: Designing Digital Surface Applications (pp. 256–273). NSERC SurfNet.

    PDF 
    @incollection{sikes2016a,
author = {Kalev Sikes and Zachary Cook and Erik Paluka and Mark Hancock and Christopher Collins},
title = {The Simple Multi-Touch Toolkit},
editor = {Frank Maurer},
booktitle = {SurfNet: Designing Digital Surface Applications},
publisher = {NSERC SurfNet},
address = {Calgary},
year = 2016,
pages = {256--273}
}

  • Cook, Z. (2013). The Simple Multi-Touch Toolkit [Poster]. UOIT Student Research Showcase.

    PDF 
    @poster{coo2013a,
author = {Zachary Cook},
title = {The Simple Multi-Touch Toolkit},
booktitle = {UOIT Student Research Showcase},
year = 2013
}

  • Paluka, E. (2011). Simple Multi-Touch: A framework for teaching multi-touch computing [Poster]. UOIT Student Research Showcase.

    PDF 
    @poster{pal2011a,
author = {Erik Paluka},
title = {Simple Multi-Touch: A framework for teaching multi-touch computing},
booktitle = {UOIT Student Research Showcase},
year = 2011
}

Acknowledgements