A multi-touch solution to build personalized interfaces for the control of remote applications

This paper presents a framework for controlling remote applications by means of personalized multi-touch interfaces. The designed framework allows end-users to fully personalize the mapping between gestures and input commands. A two-tier architecture has been developed. A formal description of the original interface is automatically generated at the server side to identify a set of available actions for controlling existing applications. The client is in charge of loading the description of the target application, allowing the user to shape the preferred mapping between gestures and actions. Finally, the server converts the identified actions into one or more commands understandable by the original computer interface. The implementation of the system for this work specifically relies on handheld multi-touch devices. Test results are encouraging, both from an objective and a subjective point of view; indeed, the designed framework resulted to outperform a traditional GUI both in terms of number of actions to perform a task and average completion time.