Tactive, a Framework for Cross Platform Development of Tabletop Applications

The number and types of applications developed for multi-touch tabletops are dramatically increased in the last years, mainly due to the fact that interactive tabletops allow a more natural interaction with the user through their multi-touch interfaces. Despite many applications share a big set of common features, e.g., gestures recognition, interface orientation, etc., almost all applications implement their home made software solutions. In this paper we present Tactive, a software layer for fast development of portable applications for multi-touch interactive tabletops. Tactive allows to abstract from hardware and software equipment and to embed a web application into a application for multi-touch surfaces. Our framework supports up to five fingers gestures recognition and communication between different windows, and allows to save more than 60% of developing time.