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Overview

Intended Audience​

This document is intended to assist Windows developers who would like to add tablet-aware capabilities to their applications so as to support the acquisition of finger data from touch-enabled Wacom tablets. For macOS support, see the Multi-Touch Framework Overview page.

Feel™ Multi- Touch SDK​

Wacom's Feel™ Multi-Touch Application Programming Interface (API) enables you to build applications that use the powerful finger detection and location capabilities of Wacom touch tablets. Use this stream of finger information to create unique features for your application, including custom gestures or direct on-screen manipulation of objects. Wacom's Feel™ Multi-Touch SDK is an API that enables any software application to connect to and receive finger touch data from Wacom Feel™ Multi-Touch supported tablets. As the end-user touches the tablet, data from each finger touch is streamed through the Wacom Feel™ Multi-Touch API.

Introduction​

The Feel™ Multi-Touch API provides a method by which applications may receive multi-finger touch data from touch-enabled Wacom devices.

In order to use the Multi-Touch API, you should have one of the Multi-Touch-supported Wacom tablets and have the Wacom Tablet Driver software installed. The driver supports the Multi-Touch API through installed DLL components that can be dynamically linked to in third party applications. The API supports various forms of finger-data, depending on which tablet is in use. Additionally, the API supports palm rejection and reports whether a given finger is thought to be in a "confident" state or not. The Feel™ Multi-Touch API allows you to write your own gesture recognizing behavior if desired, by-passing default system gestures (such as zoom or scroll).

Although new versions of the Wacom Tablet Driver released periodically will contain the Feel™ Multi-Touch library, we place a very high priority on keeping the API backwards compatible. End-users using Feel™ Multi-Touch supported applications should thus not worry that updating their Wacom Tablet Driver will cause incompatibility in their applications.

Feel™ Multi-Touch Supported Tablets​

All touch-enabled Wacom tablets supported by the Wacom driver are supported by this API. Get the tablet driver that supports your device at: https://www.wacom.com/support/product-support/drivers.

Types of Features Supported​

Using the Feel™ Multi-Touch API, you can add support for the following features to your application:

  • Per finger contact data. Information for each finger touch point is streamed to the Wacom Feel™ Multi-Touch API application.
  • Palm detection (and rejection) for non-finger contacts.
  • Per finger confidence data.
  • Touch blob data on supported tablets.
  • Raw touch data on supported tablets.
  • Applications can be designed to use both touch data and pen data for optimal user interaction.
  • A "consumer mode" to allow a single app to process all touch data.
  • An "observer mode" to allow multiple apps to process all touch data, as well as passing the data to the system for processing (such as for gesture recognition).
  • A "passthrough mode" to allow designated hitrects within consumer or observer mode applications to pass data to the system for processing (such as for button pushes in a dialog).

Operating Systems​

The Feel™ Multi-Touch API is supported by Wacom Tablet Drivers that run on supported Windows or Mac operating systems. To find out if the Feel™ Multi-Touch API supports your operating system, please go to: https://www.wacom.com/support/product-support/drivers

Programming Frameworks​

Applications using the Feel™ Multi-Touch API can be written for any programming framework that supports the import of Windows DLL modules. See our sample code for examples written in C++ and .NET (C#).

See Also​

Basics – How to configure and write Multi-Touch applications

Reference – Complete API details

FAQs – Multi-Touch programming tips

For macOS support, see the Multi-Touch Framework Overview.