Simulating touch events on a PC browser
As of April 13th 2012
In Google Chrome developer and canary builds there is now a checkbox for "Emulate touch events"
You can find it by opening the F12 developer tools and clicking on the gear at the bottom right of the screen.
For now (Chrome ver.36.0.1985.125) you can find it here: F12 => Esc => Emulation.
The desktop browser can simulate touch events by importing additional JS + CSS. Take a look at:
- addTouch
- Phantom Limb
We use this script: http://code.google.com/p/jquery-ui-for-ipad-and-iphone/ It will allow all mouse events in your application to be triggered by touch events instead. So, since we already had a web application that used right-clicking, drag-n-drop etc. it allowed us to perform all of the same functionality with touch.
I know it's almost the reverse of the simulation you were looking for (you will have to script your application to primarily be used by a mouse) but I hope it helps anyway.
Another way to simulate multi touch on a desktop browser is the Touch Emulator of Hammer.js