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Dear kde community,

Sometimes an idea sounds too good to be thrown into a crowd. It might just fade in the chattering, and overlooked when met again. I want to somehow overcome the dependency of stylus devices/digitisers. In some way to bypass the monopoly of certain manufacturers, i guess. (I love digital drawing devices, don’t understand me wrong.) But also because it would be so nice if this possible new way of making art would be born in freedom. Best case scenario: “poor yet ambitious kid gets to draw its dreams anyway.”

OK, To the point:

Place your middle finger on the touchscreen, a circle appears around it. Now let your thumb down on the screen too, two circles around your fingers are connected with a line. The index joins, there is a triangle, and, from the index there is a line extending a centimeter in front ending in the crossair that will be a brushes’ tip. Your thumb bends inward, a threshold is exceeded and triggers input, increasing flow according to the angle that your thumb makes. Move around and paint! Spread all fingers and the brush enlarges, or vice versa. Add the ring finger and you can pan/zoom/rotate while maintaining cursor position. This is just an example. The possibilities are...tiresomely vast! The disadvantages, well, it's pointless to disregard ideas for possible disadvantages because they may be worth it. After all, a regular pencil blocks your view 30% of the time, but has anyone ever cared about that? Right.

At first it might feel a little clumsy and have a steep learning curve, yet a short one too. Just about any instrument is designed for you to make the least possible distance/ effort in order to handle it with maximum precision. Lesser steps between your brain and your tool means more intuitive handling. What’s more: having direct control of a max. amount of parameters results in a broader ‘bandwidth’ of input data. Which is, in this case, a matter of proper configuration. This is exactly what a stylus is designed to do: To steer position, size, opacity etc. all at once. The underlying hardware and software basis is as good as in place, nothing really new here. Every multitouch input device could become an ‘art digitiser’ (looking at Krita, wink wink). Yes, it is very very easy for me to say this without any knowledge of software development, so please, knock my teeth out if I naively overlooked some tremendous road block. But please also consider the advantages, and the tremendous possibilities ‘at hand’.

I gently throw this rough diamond in the diamond cutter’s shop, hoping some curious cutter will investigate its potential. And I hope I made my point clearly enough. Hey, good codename: POINT!

Thanks for listening

Andronikos

i get your point, but have no touchscreen, but saw it working cause your writing!
but kde/qt is capable of multitouch. and if you have all the touchpoints... should be possible

what do you think about a multitouch-config-tool? maybe someone is already working on it?
e.g. you put all of your fingers on the touchscreen, open your hand as wide as possible.
Now every distance between all your fingertips is a maximum length.
every lengths intersect eachother and form usable section lengths.
Finally it should be possible to assign any usable max/min length of your finger-tip-geometry
with any slider or control-length within any input-context.

I have to sleep about it.
ps: here is someone working on things https://github.com/JoseExposito/touchegg
did I get your point?

Well yes, a LOT is possible, hence my tendency to start simple, so that an actual developper would be encouraged.
My worst fear is that this will end up in a chaos of additional ideas. I'm happy with any response, but please let this idea grow at its pace.
I aim at a direct goal: To overcome the nescessity of a 'buffer' device (a stylus) for making art on a touchscreen.
And yes it is very very possible, it just needs developement and testing.

edit: I mean no offence at all really, in fact you just demonstrated the possibillity-'boom'.
I just want to make this idea clear and attractive to those who might actually do the real work

You are right!
But I tried to generalize your idea, phrase the underlying geometry,
and break the main concept down to smaller comprehensible pieces.

I suggest to think toward a generalized and configurable abstract model of the hand, but maybe
there are some connecting points for interested developers:
https://krita.org/en/item/kicking-off-2016-the-first-krita-sprint/
http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qml-qtquick-multipointtoucharea.html

I just got a reply from 'the touchégg guy'. He likes the idea at acknowledges that it is possible from qt. Sadly touchégg is discontinued so I'll try to knock on some qt dev's door I guess.

Awesommmmmmm
The Krita-guys will love it, dont you think?

I'm... quite uncertain.

Not sure Krita devs will notice a topic named POINT

I'm not sure the the krita tag is enough.

The only reason I opened it is because my brain spam checker thought the title is suspicious. You might want to write something like "Multi-touch painting in Krita".