Described herein are systems and methods for enabling a multi-touch gesture recognition engine, where gesture recognition can be made based on touch or motion detection. In accordance with an embodiment the system include a hardware input list delivered from the hardware sensor(s), a touchobject list delivered from the application(s)/OS and logic to calculate and determine gestures based on mapping touchpoints from the sensor(s) with touchobjects from the application(s) in a time perspective. The engine can use a generic state machine in each gestureobject to keep track of the status of the gestureobject independently. Additional embodiments are also described herein.