When Multi-Touch Meets Streaming

With the advent of mobile devices with large displays, it is intuitive and natural for users to interact with an application on a mobile device using multi-touch gestures. In this paper, the authors propose that these multi-touch gestures can be streamed on-the-fly among multiple participating users, making it possible to engage users in a collaborative or competitive experience. Such multi-touch streams, featuring very low streaming bit rates, can be rendered on receivers to precisely reconstruct the states of an application. They present the challenges, system framework, embedded algorithm design, and real-world evaluation of TouchTime, a new system that has been designed from scratch to facilitate the streaming of multi-touch gestures among multiple users.