TUIO is an open framework that defines a common protocol and API for tangible multitouch surfaces. The TUIO protocol allows the transmission of an abstract description of interactive surfaces, including touch events and tangible object states. This protocol encodes control data from a tracker application (e.g. based on computer vision) and sends it to any client application that is capable of decoding the protocol. There exists a growing number of TUIO enabled tracker applications and TUIO client libraries for various programming environments, as well as applications that support the protocol. This combination of TUIO trackers, protocol and client implementations allows the rapid development of table based tangible multitouch interfaces. TUIO has been mainly designed as an abstraction for interactive surfaces, but also has been used in many other related application areas. Technically TUIO is based on Open Sound Control – an emerging standard for interactive environments not only limited to musical instrument control – and can be therefore easily implemented on any platform that supports OSC.
