Multi-Touch Gesture Recognition For Clutter

Multi-Pointer X has been fully supported by X.Org since the X Server 1.7 release earlier this year. The MPX support allows multiple input devices to work independently within a single running X Server. GTK has been hacked-up to allow for multi-touch events to some extent and Qt 4.6 was released with multi-touch support. The Intel developers working on Moblin and Clutter have also been working on multi-touch support for the Clutter tool-kit. In addition, they have also developed a gestures recognition framework for multi-touch (and for some gestures, single-touch) environments.

Clutter Gesture attempts to identify gestures generated from input events and then where applicable to send off these recognized gestures to the application that has focus. This framework is flexible to allow all sorts of gesture algorithms to be built-in and it can also be extended from the application side as well, but the currently supported set of input gestures include slide up, slide down, slide left, slide right, and touch&hold. Supported from the multi-touch side is the pinch/rotate gestures.

Clutter Gesture is not currently found in a released version of Clutter or Moblin, but over at Moblin.org are more details on this project along with how to experiment with this gestures framework using Moblin 2.1 and some extra RPM packages in a few simple steps.