Google Android to support multi-touch gestures? [Video]

Whilst everyone is gearing up for multi-touch support on the upcoming Windows 7, a group of French developers didn’t want us to forget about Linux. They have shown off a proof of concept multi-touch demonstration which is running on the 2.6.30 Kernel.

The demo shows them using a number of multi-touch gestures, including desktop switching, water ripple effects and rotating and resizing windows. They claim that this is native Linux multi-touch support. It was developed by Mohamed-Ikbel Boulabiar, Stephane Chatty, and Sebastien Hamdani, from the Interactive Computing Lab at the ENAC (Ecole Nationale de l’Aviation Civile) aeronautics academy in Toulouse, France.

“The video shows multi-touch effects that are being supported natively to send ABS_MT_* events from the kernel,” wrote Boulabiar. “When making the demos, I have chosen to use general libraries not related to a WM, to be able to run demos on any Linux platform.” Boulabiar added that he expects the technology to be incorporated into the Google-sponsored Android stack.

A whole raft of capacitive touchscreen netbooks are due to launch in the second half of the year, in time for Windows 7. Hopefully this news means that users will be able to take advantage of multi-touch gestures on some of the netbook-focused Linux distros including Android. Check out the video demo below.

Via Linux Devices.