Gestures, Shapes and Multitouch Interaction

Abstract—We discuss issues related to the design of a multi-touch gesture sensing environment, allowing the user to execute both independent and coordinated gestures. We discuss differ-ent approaches, comparing frontal vs. back projection devices and gesture tracking vs. shape recognition. To compare the approaches we introduce a simple gesture language for drawing diagrams. A test multitouch device built around FTIR technology is illustrated; a vision system, driven by a visual dataflow programming environment, interprets the user gestures and classifies them into a set of predefined patterns, corresponding to language commands. I