http://sourceforge.net/projects/pooky/
(There’s nothing there as of yet, but there will be after the final presentation of the project (soon). The presentation demo will be recorded, and I’ll make sure to provide a link later on.)

For the past 12 weeks myself, and 8 other computer science students at the University of Ghent (Belgium), have been working on a Mozilla Firefox extension that would allow us to use Multi-Touch events in HTML-pages displayed in Firefox. Since we’re using tBeta as our input TUIO server, and some community feedback on the relevance of our project would be greatly appreciated, we thought we should post our project here.

PookyTouch allows you to catch Multi-Touch events in HTML-pages in Firefox, following the Safari API used for the iPhone. More specifically you can detect the “start”, “end”, “move” and “cancel” of a touch. Thus enabling just about anybody who knows how to create a HTML website (so really just about anybody) to easily write Multi-Touch applications. Those applications can then be run on any device that supports Firefox, going from actual Multi-Touch tables or walls to the more recently available Multi-Touch enabled laptops. For those who would be interested: We also support XUL.

We were wondering if a project like this ignites a spark of enthusiasm here at Multi-Touch central. So please, although it is rather difficult without actually being able to test the extension yourselves (working on an alpha), let us know what you think.

nice work guys…

JESUS CHRIST :D:D:D:D:D

This is the best thing ever!!!!

How about a plugin for firefox that lets you scroll, zoom and click on links in firefox, 1 finger is click, 2 is scroll etc. :p

Sounds fantastic. I really look forward to seeing the presentation and getting to try the extension first hand.

Sounds very nice!
Keep us informed!

Yes this is something I am interested in also, as my daily laptop is a DELL XT running windows 7 which allows me to use the screen in tablet mode and use multitouch.  I love Firefox and only use it as much as possible, but currently only IE supports MT gestures like pinch zoom and scroll.  If you guys get this done it would be very much appreciated.

the Belgian Touch ! keep up the good work !!

I think there is/would be large interest in this. Looks like you’re doing great work!

I’m curious, what do you mean by ‘multitouch applications’ in the sense of html?

Seth (cerupcat) - 11 May 2009 06:26 PM

I think there is/would be large interest in this. Looks like you’re doing great work!

I’m curious, what do you mean by ‘multitouch applications’ in the sense of html?

Pretty much the same as plain old applications. There are off course some limitations because everything needs to be made in html and javascript, but thanks to libraries such as jquery, more and more is becoming possible. Actually, although our website will be touch-enabled, none of our demo’s is a website. I’m not going to entirely spoil the launch, but two things we have build are a “Risk” and a “Jiggsaw Puzzle” application. Both were created within one week by one person (and since were students, it’s far from a standard work week spent)

Also, we’re not limited to html for application development. We also support XUL.
Firefox itself, and some other application such as virtualbox and songbird are created in XUL. XUL applications can be hosted on a webserver and used remotely inside a Firefox browser window. Because of this “real” applications are certainly possible.

The biggest limitation right now is the rendering in Firefox. Apart from that pretty much any application you can think of can be made Multi-Touch enabled with our extension, as long as you’re willing to write it in html/javascript or XUL.

PeauProductions - 11 May 2009 02:53 PM

Yes this is something I am interested in also, as my daily laptop is a DELL XT running windows 7 which allows me to use the screen in tablet mode and use multitouch.  I love Firefox and only use it as much as possible, but currently only IE supports MT gestures like pinch zoom and scroll.  If you guys get this done it would be very much appreciated.

This might interest you. Since we were feeling kind of guilty of not having anything to show you guys, we’ve made a video on the Dell XT of one of our team members to prove it actually works

After the presentation later this week I’ll upload the video’s of our other demo’s (on a Multi-Touch wall) and hopefully there’ll be a release version of the extension available by then too.

Man, this is something big. Can’t wait for this. Keep up the good work! 

how are you handling tuio on the client end?

is the window filtering out certain regions of the screen, or does it only work full screen?

sounds like an essential bit of software, and we’d like to get it up and running on our large table.

-

At the moment it only works (correctly) in full screen mode. However, we can identify each HTML tag which has a multitouch event listener attached to. We are currently working at an Jquery plugin.
It greatly simplifies the design and coding of mt-webapps. A release date for the code has not been set yet (but we’d like to target 1.8.2009). Greetz, Nico

This is a great idea, I am looking forward to the actual release!
There is already an entry for a similar project at TUIO.org,
and I will of course add yours as soon as it becomes available.
best, martin.K

How the pooky project is it going ?