jQMultiTouch: lightweight toolkit and development framework for multi-touch/multi-device web interfaces

Abstract

Application developers currently have to deal with the increased proliferation of new touch devices and the diversity in terms of both the native platform support for common gesture-based interactions and touch input sensing and processing techniques, in particular, for custom multi-touch behaviours. This paper presents jQMultiTouch - a lightweight web toolkit and development framework for multi-touch interfaces that can run on many different devices and platforms. jQMultiTouch is inspired from the popular jQuery toolkit for implementing interfaces in a device-independent way based on client-side web technologies. Similar to jQuery, the framework resolves cross-browser compatibility issues and implementation differences between device platforms by providing a uniform method for the specification of multi-touch interface elements and associated behaviours that seamlessly translate to browser-specific code. At the core of jQMultiTouch is a novel input stream query language for filtering and processing touch event data based on an extensible set of match predicates and aggregate functions. We demonstrate design simplicity for developers along several example applications and discuss performance, scalability and portability of the framework.