For those of you who don’t know it, if something provides Multi-Touch input methods, it means that you (and potentially an almost arbitrary number of other people) can interact with the same device using as many of your fingers as you like.

This technique is relatively new to most of us and I have been blown away when I first saw a video of someone interacting with a so-called Multi-Touch table:

(If you’re reading this posting via a planet or feed reader, please click this posting’s title to see the videos on my blog directly.)

In case you like the python programming language, you might be as excited as I was to know that there’s actually a library that allows you to write multi-touch software yourself. This library is PyMT. It’s based on top of OpenGL and allows you to deal with multi-touch input events in a nicely abstracted way. PyMT is cross-platform, open-source and actively developed. It comes with many examples, a mouse simulator (in case you don’t have such a table) and (in the development branch) support for the new touchpads found in recent macbooks as well as other types of hardware (HP touchsmart, etc.). Here’s an old demo video that shows what PyMT is capable of already:

I was so impressed by what is possible that I started diving into the matter quite some time ago. I’m even building my own table at the moment. The thesis I’m currently working on also relies on PyMT. If you got an appetite, feel free to join us in #pymt on irc.freenode.net or the mailing lists.

In order to show you how easy it can be, here’s a quick demo I just wrote.

If you are interested in building your own hardware (yes, you can), let me suggest you take a look at the excellent NUI community. They have software, forums and even a book available for free for you to learn and explore.