TUIOFX: A JavaFX Toolkit for Shared Interactive Surfaces

Building multi-touch multi-user applications for Shared Interactive Surfaces is a complex endeavour that requires fundamental knowledge in touch enabling hardware, gesture recognition, graphical representation of digital information and multi-user interaction. While several specialised toolkits help developers in this effort, we identified a variety of challenges with these toolkits, as for example the lack of cross-platform support, the limited number of touch-enabled multi-user widgets, missing documentation, and lacking community support -- all raising the barriers to entry. In this paper, we present TUIOFX, a toolkit for developing multi-touch, multi-user applications for Shared Interactive Surfaces in Java, which tackles all of the identified problems. The sophisticated implementation of TUIOFX adds support for TUIO-enabled hardware and multi-user interaction under the hood of JavaFX, and leaves the well-learned JavaFX API for the developers fully intact -- thus allowing particularly novices a very quick start. In this paper we provide the technical insights, in the concepts and their elegant implementation.