Lenovo has announced this month a global hackathon to invite developers to leverage their multi-touch SDK to build interactive touchscreen apps. Developers have until June 14 to submit their apps and get the chance to win one of the prizes including $25,000 in cash, YOGA devices and promotion of your app on the Lenovo platform.
Lenovo introduced its multi-user & multi-touch (10 finger-touch) technology to its Yoga Home series of tabletops PCs. But the company recently made this “Aura” interface available to all developers using the Windows 8 or Windows 10 SDKs and the YOGA Home Aura Shell Integration Requirements, and it hopes developers will leverage it to build better multi-touch apps:
Recognizing up to 10 simultaneous points of contact directly on a screen or touchpad, Aura allows users to perform an array of actions with their fingers, including swipes, pinch-and-zoom, and rotations.
With Multi-user, multi-touch technology (MUMT), you can let people use their whole hand (or both!) to experience a more natural, intuitive touchscreen interface. Create collaborative computing scenarios with entertainment value by letting users enjoy media and education resources together. And, with Microsoft’s new Windows Universal App Platform, you can build apps that work across multiple devices.
This hackathon is open to all individuals who have reached the age of majority (legal age), teams of eligible individuals and organizations with up to 50 employees. To participate, you must either build a new Windows Desktop or UWP app for Lenovo YOGA Home PCs or update an existing app to include MUMT features and adhere to the YOGA Home Aura Shell Integration Requirements. Last, the three judging criteria will be the quality of the idea, the implementation of MUMT features and the user experience and design of the application.
You can view the full rules of the hackathon over there. Please tell us in the comments if you think this kind of initiatives can bring more developers to embrace the Windows platform.
