Multi-user chorded toolkit for multi-touch screens.

ABSTRACTIn this work, we present the design and implementation of a chorded menu for multiple users on a large multi-touch vertical display. Instead of selecting an item in a fixed menu by reaching for it, users make a selection by touching multiple fingers simultaneously on any place of the display. Previous research on multi-touch toolkits has provided basic access to touch events, but there is no support for advanced user interface widgets, such as chords. For this purpose, we extended the open-source PyMT toolkit with an architecture that supports alternative user interaction strategies with chorded menus. In addition, we built a multi-user extension that supports chords for two or more users. Chords could be used for having user-aware MT applications. Our toolkit is open source and has been designed as a widget that could be integrated into broader interaction frameworks for multi-touch screens.