Ideum first presented Tangible Engine back in 2016. It was the first software package of its kind to allow developers to create applications that recognize physical objects on projected-capacitive touch screens. Tangible Engine can be bundled with our touch tables and we’ve made a series of updates over the years to extend and improve tangible recognition.

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Tangible Engine has supported multiple displays since version 2.0 was released in 2018. Since then, changes in authoring within Unity—and in particular, Unity’s built-in touch support—have made this feature a bit more complicated to implement. Back before Unity had native support for touch, we recommended authoring with Touchscript, a well-documented multitouch library for Unity. This remains the best way to author multiple display implementations with Tangible Engine.

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Current users of Tangible Engine (version 2.6 is the latest) can use Touchscript to develop multiple touch display applications. (Note that if you already have a hardware solution that allows multiple displays to be seen as one large display in Windows, you can author with Unity’s native support for touch.)

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If you have separate multiple displays, they will need to be configured horizontally, vertically, or in a square. In other words, the canvas in Unity needs to span the touch monitors. In addition, the touch displays you use will need to have the same resolution; otherwise, it isn’t possible to create that extended canvas. For example, two 4K monitors side-by-side would need a canvas size that is 7860 x 2160.

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In the next few weeks, we will be releasing Tangible Engine version 2.7 with some performance enhancements and new support documentation, and a sample project for multiple screen support. In addition, we will be updating the visualizer that is part of the larger Tangible Engine software package. You can join our email list to be the first to know. In the meantime, if you have questions about Tangible Engine multi-display support, please feel free to reach out to our sales or support team.