Innovative Multi-Touch Interaction

Abstract

Given the rise of touch-screen technology in recent years, it makes sense to explore new possibilities to employ them. So too thought the municipality of Delft. For their planned new office, they are currently experimenting with different ways and technologies to boost productivity. These experiments take place in the innovation lab, or iLab. One such experi-ment aims to find innovative uses for touch- screens. The muncipality of Delft has outsourced part of this experiment to teams of students from the Delft University of Technology as their Bachelor project. A collaborative multi touch game, called Jest, was chosen as the product to meet these needs. By focusing on the interaction and the user experience, familiarity with innovative techniques can be nourished. This report documents the development process of Jest. In order to ensure a modicum of technical quality, proven techniques such as unit testing and pair programming were used. An external party also evaluated the code artifacts of the product, and commended the clear structure and simple separation of concerns, but found some amount of code duplication in the tests. In Jest, players have to create a network of paths and instructions to guide vehicles carrying cargo to their destinations. Players face several challenges along the way, such as timing issues and interesting level properties. Jest is developed for the JVM in the Clojure language, loosely following a system design focusing on clear module separation and scalability. Jest is deployable on both Windows and GNU/Linux. Several hurdles had to be overcome while developing Jest, such as the fact that the JVM originally did not support the multi touch API on Windows, requiring jumping through several hoops to make this work. The project was delayed, mostly due to developer inexperience, which led to the project lasting 18 instead of 10 weeks. Aside from some rough spots in the planning and development process, the project resulted in a working prototype which can easily be improved upon for many different situations.Computer Graphics and VisualizationElectrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Scienc