Software Engineering Principles in the Midas Gesture Specification Language

While many technologies for gesture-based interaction have been proposed and implemented, few focus on core software engineering principles that are commonplace in traditional programming languages. The lack of such principles restricts the applicability of those technologies when developing large scale gesture enabled systems. This paper describes the software engineering challenges associated with developing multi-touch gesture-based interaction, and proposes a solution in the form of the Midas declarative gesture specification language. Midas embeds concepts of logical programming languages and complex event processing to ease the development of gesture based applications. We show how it can be applied to multi-touch gesture recognition, and evaluated our solution in real-world applications.