BANGALORE, INDIA: The interaction between computers and humans has reached new proportions, as is evident from the new forms of interaction that are emerging. Apart from standard input devices (like keyboards and mouse) an emerging technique to input information is via touchscreens.

These can be further divided into two types:?single touch and multi-touch. In a single touch device, information can be fed using a single instance of touch while multi touch allows for more than one touch simultaneously; this means one can use more than one finger to feed information or more than one user can input information. A multi-touch device has a touch screen and software that recognizes multiple simultaneous touches.

As an example, just look at the 'iPhone, ' where Multi-touch is garnering a lot of attention. The future of this technology looks bright as more and more work is being done in this area. Microsoft is soon going to include Multi-touch functionality in its next version of Windows, 'Windows 7.'

As the cost associated with multi-touch devices is decreasing, the need to develop applications that harness multi-touch functionality is also increasing. In this article, we shall develop a sample program that shows how easily one can develop a multi-touch application that can run on Windows Vista or XP.

Implementing Multi-touch
To build this application we used Visual Studio 2008 with C# as the programming language and the .NET framework 3.5. We started with creating a 'WPF Application,' named as 'FirstMultitouch'. The next step is to add reference to this application. This can be done by right clicking on 'References' and then clicking on 'Add reference'. We have to add 'Multitouch.Framework.WPF.dll' to this project. This required file can be downloaded from http://tinyurl.com/ 6enfy6 . One can find this file at 'MultiTouchVista\Framework'. After adding the reference, open 'Window1.axml' file now and add the following code to the file:

xmlns:mt="http://schemas.multitouch.com/Multitouch/2008/04"
Title="Window1" Height="300" Width="300">

Open 'Window1.cs' file and change it to the following:
namespace sandeep
{
public partial class Window1 : Multitouch.Framework.WPF.Controls.Window
{
public Window1()
{
InitializeComponent();
}
}
}

To show output we need 'Multotouch.Console.Service.exe' running in the background. This service is located at 'MultiTouchVista\Service'. Once all this has been done just run your application. It will show a 'PCQuest' logo that can be touched and moved around (red dot will act as touch point that can be used with mouse).