Linux native multitouch support

This demo made by Mohamed-Ikbel Boulabiar, Stephane Chatty and Sebastien Hamdani from the Interactive Computing Lab at ENAC shows how one can use the multi-touch capabilities that Henrik Rydberg added to the Linux input system.

You need: Linux kernel 2.6.30; a computer with a Broadcom 5974, Stantum, NTrig or DiamondTouch surface (the HP TouchSmart tx2 has a Ntrig surface, but you need to get the appropriate firmware from the NTrig site); our NTrig, Stantum, or DiamondTouch driver, or the Broadcom 5974 driver from Henrik Rydberg; our demo code.

demo source code
stantum multitouch tablet driver
NTrig multitouch screen driver
How to use the code: The demo code reads input directly from the device file ("/dev/input/eventX"). The X server is not involved in input handling at this stage. The demos perform very simple gesture recognition then send DBus messages to Compiz to produce effects. You need to activate Compiz with the DBus plugin to get the demo working, and for window rotate/scale you will also need the freewins plugin.

What's next: The demos use really fast-coded simple applications, and only provide a proof-of-concept of what we can do with the new Linux Kernel. The MT events are in kernel 2.6.30. Our MT code in the NTrig driver is in the linux-next git tree. Our Stantum and DiamondTouch drivers will be submitted soon, hopefully in time for 2.6.31. This also raises many questions about how the input subsystem and X.org could evolve to handle multitouch kernel events even better. This is ongoing work with X.org and kernel contributors: Henrik Rydberg is working on a X.org multitouch driver, Peter Hutterer informed us that Bryan Goldstein is working on resurrecting the MPX blob branch that Peter has developped two years ago, and we might make some proposals as well.

Context: This work was done as part of project ShareIT, a research project in which we collaborate with our good friends the multitouch hardware makers at Stantum, the multitouch software and interaction experts at IntuiLab and the aircraft cockpit designers at Thales Avionics to explore the use of multitouch user interfaces in cockpits. But no, there is no plan to use Linux in the cockpit, this is just for the lab's research :-)

Multitouch? Here is some more information about multitouch interaction, available devices, multitouch on Linux, etc.

Contact: medikbel at lii-enac.fr

http://www.lii-enac.fr/en/projects/shareit/linux.html