Towards a formalization of multi-touch gestures

Multi-touch is a technology which offers new styles of interaction compared to traditional input devices like keyboard and mouse. Users can quickly manipulate objects or execute commands by means of their fingers and hands. Current multi-touch frameworks offer a set of standard gestures that are easy to use when developing an application. In contrast, defining new gestures requires a lot of work involving low-level recognition of touch data. To address this problem, we contribute a discussion of strategies towards a formalization of gestural interaction on multi-touch surfaces. A test environment is presented, showing the applicability and benefit within multi-touch frameworks.