A Low-Cost, Low-Latency Multi-Touch Table with Haptic Feedback for Musical Applications

During the past decade, multi-touch surfaces have emerged as valuable tools for collaboration, display, interaction, and musical expression. Unfortunately, they tend to be costly and often suffer from two drawbacks for music performance: (1) relatively high latency owing to their sensing mechanism, and (2) lack of haptic feedback. We analyze the latency present in several current multi-touch platforms, and we describe a new custom system that reduces latency to an average of 30 ms while providing programmable haptic feedback to the user. The paper concludes with a description of ongoing and future work.