Linux native multitouch support

This demo made by Mohamed-Ikbel Boulabiar, Stephane Chatty and Sebastien Hamdani from the Interactive Computing Lab at ENAC shows how one can use the multi-touch capabilities that Henrik Rydberg added to the Linux input system.



You need:

  • Linux kernel 2.6.31 or more recent;
  • a computer with a Linux-compatible multitouch device. Here is a list of available multitouch devices and their status;
  • the corresponding driver. Some are already in the Linux kernel sources, others are here: Stantum MTP, Stantum HID, 3M, Quanta, MosArt, DiamondTouch;
  • you will also need to import bits from hid-core.c and hid-ids.h into the drivers/hid directory of your kernel sources. Here is some more information on how to proceed;
  • our demo code.


    How to use the code: The demo code reads input directly from the device file ("/dev/input/eventX"). The X server is not involved in input handling at this stage. The demos perform very simple gesture recognition then send DBus messages to Compiz to produce effects. You need to activate Compiz with the DBus plugin to get the demo working, and for window rotate/scale you will also need the freewins plugin.

    The roadmap: The demos are fast-coded simple applications that read multitouch events directly from the kernel. The multitouch events are in the kernel since version 2.6.30, as well as the Broadcom driver. Our multitouch code in the N-Trig driver is in the kernel since version 2.6.31. Our Stantum HID, Quanta, MosArt and 3M drivers are in the middle of the submission process, and hopefully will be in 2.6.33. Our DiamondTouch drivers be submitted as soon as CircleTwelve and/or Mitsubish Electric give us the green light for redistributing their firmware under GPL. The lab is currently contributing to the multitouch management in X.org. At some point later, it might be time to work on a more general input framework for Linux and/or X.org because multitouch breaks a few assumptions.

    Context: This work was done as part of project ShareIT, a research project in which we collaborate with our good friends the multitouch hardware makers at Stantum, the multitouch software and interaction experts at IntuiLab and the aircraft cockpit designers at Thales Avionics to explore the use of multitouch user interfaces in cockpits. But no, there is no plan to use Linux in the cockpit, this is just for the lab's research :-)

    Multitouch? Here is some more information about multitouch interaction, available devices, multitouch on Linux, etc.

    Contact: chatty at enac.fr
    Updated Feb 6, 2010.