Open Exhibits is multitouch and multiuser software initiative funded by the National Science Foundation. The software is free to students, museums and other educational organizations.

Open Exhibits received funding on September 15, 2010. It is a three-year project. Open Exhibits provides tools that allow both programmers and non-programmers to create multitouch exhibits.

Flash, Flex and Air developers can take advantage of open-source software modules and templates. Non-programmers can populate pre-built templates to create new exhibits.

Open Exhibits core is essentially the educational version of GestureWorks, a multitouch framework for Adobe Flash, Flex, and AIR. The core has over 200 gestures built-in and includes a multitouch simulator. It supports simultaneous gesturing and has a point-clustering algorithm. It also allows for the elegant degradation of touch events to mouse events on non-touch systems.

Modules are functional components that can be used as building blocks for templates and exhibits. They focus on single application functionality and can be used alone or combined to create rich templates and exhibits. Templates are full of exhibits without content. You can add content via external XML files or customize a template to include other modules or new functions. Exhibits are floor-ready applications. Content is included, but exhibits can be modified to include other data or modules.

The Open Exhibits SDK includes a gesture analysis engine and Gesture Markup Language (GML) library. This enables museums to create innovative gesture-driven exhibits without needing to program gestures or object transformations. Gestures can be enabled and modified through GML, and triggered through a variety of input devices including touch screens, Leap Motion Controller, Microsoft Kinect, TUIO, and more.