Midas: a declarative multi-touch interaction framework

ABSTRACT

Over the past few years, multi-touch user interfaces emerged from research prototypes into mass market products. This evolution has been mainly driven by innovative devices such as Apple's iPhone or Microsoft's Surface tabletop computer. Unfortunately, there seems to be a lack of software engineering abstractions in existing multi-touch development frameworks. Many multi-touch applications are based on hard-coded procedural low level event processing. This leads to proprietary solutions with a lack of gesture extensibility and cross-application reusability. We present Midas, a declarative model for the definition and detection of multi-touch gestures where gestures are expressed via logical rules over a set of input facts. We highlight how our rule-based language approach leads to improvements in gesture extensibility and reusability. Last but not least, we introduce JMidas, an instantiation of Midas for the Java programming language and describe how JMidas has been applied to implement a number of innovative multi-touch gestures.

References

1. F. P. Brooks, Jr. No Silver Bullet: Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering. IEEE Computer, 20(4):10--19, April 1987.
2. F. Echtler and G. Klinker. A Multitouch Software Architecture. In Proc. of NordiCHI 2008, 5th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, pages 463--466, Lund, Sweden, 2008.
3. C. L. Forgy. RRete: A Fast Algorithm for the Many Pattern/Many Object Pattern Match Problem. Artificial Intelligence, 19(1):17--37, 1982.
4. E. Friedman-Hill. Jess in Action: Java Rule-Based Systems. Manning Publications, July 2003.
5. L. Hoste. Experiments with the SunSPOT Accelerometer. Project report, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, 2009.
6. M. Kaltenbrunner, T. Bovermann, R. Bencina, and E. Costanza. TUIO: A Protocol for Table-Top Tangible User Interfaces. In Proc. of GW 2005, 6th Intl. Workshop on Gesture in Human-Computer Interaction and Simulation, Ile de Berder, France, May 2005.
7. D. Kammer, M. Keck, G. Freitag, and M. Wacker. Taxonomy and Overview of Multi-touch Frameworks: Architecture, Scope and Features. In Proc. of Workshop on Engineering Patterns for Multi-Touch Interfaces, Berlin, Germany, June 2010.
8. I. Maier, T. Rompf, and M. Odersky. Deprecating the Observer Pattern. Technical Report EPFL-REPORT-148043, Ecole Polytechnique Fédeérale de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland, 2010.
9. L. H. Nakatani and J. A. Rohrlich. Soft Machines: A Philosophy of User-Computer Interface Design. In Proc. of CHI '83, ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pages 19--23, Boston, USA, December 1983.
10. A. D. Nardi. Grafiti: Gesture Recognition mAnagement Framework for Interactive Tabletop Interfaces. Master's thesis, University of Pisa, 2008.
11. P. Ramanahally, S. Gilbert, T. Niedzielski, D. Velázquez, and C. Anagnost. Sparsh UI: A Multi-Touch Framework for Collaboration and Modular Gesture Recognition. In Proc. of WINVR 2009, Conference on Innovative Virtual Reality, pages 1--6, Chalon-sur-SaoÆne, France, February 2009.
12. D. Rubine. Specifying Gestures by Example. In Proc. of ACM SIGGRAPH '91, 18th Intl. Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, pages 329--337, Las Vegas, USA, August 1991.
13. B. Signer, U. Kurmann, and M. C. Norrie. iGesture: A General Gesture Recognition Framework. In Proc. of ICDAR 2007, 9th Intl. Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition, pages 954--958, Curitiba, Brazil, September 2007.
14. J. Stewart, B. B. Bederson, and A. Druin. Single Display Groupware: A Model for Co-present Collaboration. In Proc. of CHI '99, ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pages 286--293, Pittsburgh, USA, May 1999.

Index Terms

• Human-centered computing

  • Human computer interaction (HCI)

• Software and its engineering

  • Software organization and properties

    • Software system structures

      • Software architectures