The Botanical Garden of the University of Padova, founded in 1545 and the oldest university botanical garden in the world, wanted a way for visitors to get closer to its collection than labels and signs allow. The answer was an interactive touch table: a shared surface where several people can browse the collection at the same time, each at their own pace.

We developed the software at Piramid in 2022 as an Electron app, with React handling the interface and Canvas rendering the content and its movement on the table. The table's touch frame communicates over TUIO, and we built the layer that receives those raw touch points and turns them into reliable gestures, so that different visitors dragging, zooming and opening items side by side never get in each other's way.

That was the real challenge of the project. With several people touching the table at once, a constant stream of touch events comes in from the frame, and each one has to be tracked, matched to the right gesture and the right item, and fed into the app's workflow without conflicts or lost input. Making that pipeline solid is what lets the table feel simple to the people using it.