I was talking yesterday with my good friend Carlos Garnacho about touchscreens and multi-touch and I discover a couple of interesting projects. The first was Garnacho who pointed me out. I didn’t know that project. It was MPX (Multi-pointer X Server).
I tought this was a project for creating drivers for those multi-pointer (or multi-touch) touchscreens which start to be on the streets, but actually is something more. It seems the Xorg X server itself doesn’t support more than one pointer at time, so those people had to make some changes on him.
I didn’t have time yet to read docs and code, or just testing, but I think I’ll try. It looks interesting project to me.
The other project I found was tbeta which is a project for providing a multi-pointer (or multi-touch) support via video input. Which means it emulating a multi-touch screen using video camera to see the pointers (e.g. the fingers).
That’s pretty interesting project as well… And it is not necessary expensive to use it. If you don’t believe me, watch this:
Multitouch Mini (MTmini) – My Cheap Multitouch Pad
More details about the video here
I hope you like those projects 🙂
UPDATED: Another friend (Luis) is working on this stuff and give me some nice links:
..when will the multitouch functions of the new MacBook Pros Just Work in Ubuntu? Jaunty+1?
@ethana2: Good question. I know Synaptic driver can manage some gestures and multitouch tricks but I guess you need to configure them.
There is some graphical interface like gsynaptics and tpconfig for doing that, but I not sure if they can manage the kind of gestures MacOS does.
More hacky and tricky is this way:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/os-touchpad/index.html
But that is still good information about how those devices works and how to hack them a bit.
You should take a look to the HP touchsmart series. Multitouch is closer than we think. good thing that MPX is (almost) ready, but I still see a lot of hacking to be done in linux to make it work decently easy.
Another person you might be interested in contacting is Henrik Rydberg. He has been working on getting a multitouch protocol into the kernel.
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel.input/6274