In the past two years, hardware vendors have released drivers for multi-touch devices running on Windows 7. Since direct injection of multi-touch input uses the Human Interface Device (HID) for USB protocol, it represents a new way of transferring touch data to client applications acting as an alternative to the Tangible User Interface protocol (TUIO) previously introduced. Anecdotally, TUIO has been criticized in the past for slowing applications down because of noticeable latency gaps between

more »

... touch interactions and visual feedback from the system. This problem can result in poor user experiences and software quality degradation, both of which are contributing factors to device rejection in the marketplace. Over time touch-based systems have evolved into modular systems making it challenging to track performance bottlenecks in the overall system. This thesis focuses on high-performance multi-touch software systems by comparing HID and TUIO to determine which protocol contributes the lowest latency. A semi-automated benchmark harness was constructed for an existing system to simulate and monitor different scenarios commonly observed in multi-touch interactions, with the goal of stress-testing both protocols without the presence of hardware. A performance evaluation was conducted on the modified system and the results indicate that, when compared to TUIO, HID is a faster protocol for multi-touch data transfer under constantly changing and often strenuous conditions.