Sparsh UI: A Multi-Touch Framework for Collaboration and Modular Gesture Recognition

Most current multi-touch libraries provide support to recognize the touch input from particular hardware and seldom support complex gestures. For rapid prototyping and development of multi-touch applications, particularly for collaboration across multiple disparate devices, there is a need for a framework which can support an array of multi-touch hardware, provide gesture processing, be cross platform compatible, and allow applications to be developed in the desired programming language. In this paper we present criteria for evaluating a multi-touch library and “Sparsh UI”— an open source multi-touch library which is a novel attempt to address these issues by enabling developers to easily develop multi-touch applications. We also compare Sparsh UI with other multi-touch libraries and describe several Sparsh-based applications, including BasePlate, a system for collaborative virtual assembly.