G1 Multitouch Proof Of Concept

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSBYqmWVqeM]

[RyeBrye] has been trying to get multitouch working on the Android based T-Mobile G1. He hacked the Synaptics touchscreen driver so that it would dump raw event info to a character device. The demo above is using example code from Google for a fingerpaint program. Polling the device is not the fastest method, but [RyeBrye] just wanted to get a demo out there to prove it could be done.

7 thoughts on “G1 Multitouch Proof Of Concept

  1. now lets see the “pinch” ?

    apple patenting a gesture should not be allowed.

    that would be like Ford trying to patent the left-turn, or the Army patenting the “finger point” (Uncle Sam poster).

    well, I can think of one gesture to give apple…

  2. looks definitively like we’ll have to wait for someone to built an android-phone with a *real* multi-touchscreen… (actually it’s quite a shame the G1 doesn’t have one, when it’s not able to out-bling the iPhone, it should at least have been filled with equally nice technology, multitouch, OpenGL ES, accelleration sensors, a compass and GPS. well, it does have a GPS, doesn’t it?)

  3. Hmm would have been much better if you showed an example of two lines forming in different directions. Most lines he made were going in the same direction and forming the same shape.

  4. Pinch is not hard to do, and it seems like the device has some kind of pinch recognition going on because once you start a pinch motion, the coordinates for both fingers appear to kind of jump a bit – like if you were pinching along the diagonal line riunning from the top right to bottom-left corner, the phone remaps the coordinates (it seems) to be on the diagonal from the top-left to bottom-right diagonal. This weird behavior I believe might be some kind of residue left over from Synaptics EGR stuff, but if we can notice that jump when it happens it should make recognizing a pinch very easy.

    There is no reason we as outside developers can’t look at the multitouch issue, come up with a good gameplan, and implement it.

    As far as patents are concerned, that is for the lawyers to figure out. Just host the code in a country with friendly laws and let Apple try to stop a river with their bare hands.

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