Creating a Collaborative Multi‐touch Computer Aided Design Program

Baseplate is a multi‐touch application that leverages the advantages of collaboration in a multi‐ touch environment. Users can build structures from basic building blocks and have the option to collaborate across multi‐touch devices in order to complete a building task. The application incorporates the use of innovative gestures and accelerometer‐based handheld devices for manipulating the environment. Usability testing shall be conducted in order to ascertain the ease and effectiveness of collaboration, the gestures, and accelerometer input in the multi‐touch environment. 1. Introduction Multi‐touch is a human‐computer interaction technique that allows users to interact with a system without the conventional input devices, such as a mouse or keyboard. Typical multi‐touch systems consist of a touch screen (table, wall, etc.) or touchpad, as well as software and hardware that can recognize multiple simultaneous touch points, contrary to standard touch screens, such as computer touchpads or ATM machines, which generally recognize only one touch point at a time. To recognize the multi‐touch input from various multi‐touch devices and to extract gesture information, a software application must support different types of hardware devices and perform gesture processing. Our program utilizes Sparsh UI to implement this type of processing. Sparsh UI is an open source multi‐touch gesture recognition application programming interface (API) that supports a variety of multi‐touch input devices and was created at Iowa State University. Sparsh UI also enables development of multi‐touch applications on any platform or operating system and in any programming language. The purpose of the Baseplate project is to explore collaborative assembly in a virtual environment. This work continues research in the Haptics Lab at Iowa State University's Virtual Reality Applications Center begun with a 60 " multi‐touch table [1]. A primary design goal for Baseplate is to keep the user's interactions as natural as possible. Baseplate is thus inspired by LEGO® bricks (Lego), as this type of building is widely familiar and often involves collaboration between multiple participants. While Baseplate currently uses basic, Lego‐like building blocks it can, in the future, be generalized to allow the collaborative assembly of any 3D computer models such as those created in professional Computer Aided Design (CAD) programs such as AutoCAD or SolidWorks. " Collaboration " in this context refers to multiple simultaneous users, potentially with each in a different location, using their own personal (single user) multi‐touch input devices [2]. Baseplate is therefore designed to support multiple input devices, e.g. a smaller …