Using an Android tablet as input device for a desktop app

I’m looking at ways to have the player use an Android tablet as an input device for a desktop Unity game (so it’s basically a touchpad of sorts). Right now my options seem to be (1) finding an existing Android app that somehow communicates touch input to the desktop in some usable format (not yet found one), or (2) build a Unity app for Android that reads touch input, and somehow communicate that to my computer where the desktop Unity game.

My main concern is that it needs to be quite easy to set up and work reliably. Does anyone know if there are existing solutions? Or recommended ways to implement this myself? I’ve got some ideas of my own but I want to be sure there aren’t easier solutions.

I’ve done something like this in the past. Not using android or unity, but iOS. But the approach should work for your question as well.

The approach :

  1. Create a desktop app.
  2. Run a server on desktop.
  3. Have a web API that communicate with the server.
  4. Have a mobile app (android app in your case)
  5. Communicate between server (web API) and mobile app (I was just sending some HTML requests with parameters appended to the URL and grabbing it from web api side of things and feeding it to the main desktop app)

Keep in mind that I was not using this for realtime input instead just passing commands to the desktop app from an iPad, as in ‘Start app’, ‘close screen saver’ kind of thing,

I know this is a pretty vague. Hope it helps though.

Haven’t personally ever tried it, but I’d probably try to use Bluetooth a la Google Code Archive - Long-term storage for Google Code Project Hosting.