Move Over, Microsoft Surface: Multi-Touch Computing on a Budget

Joe Tech — Thu, 22 May 2008 07:26:37 +0000

After my last post, I’ve been itching to make another video post. Last night, it all just fell in my lap while perusing HackADay.com. A recent post there, “Multitouch project roundup” talks about the many variations of multi-touch devices people are building in response to Microsoft Surface and the technology that preceded it. The problem with surface and some multi-touch implementations is that Surface will undoubtedly be out of your price range and mine and other DIY implementations have appeared daunting and still fairly expensive to pull off. Last night, one implementation, called mtmini, stood out from the crowd as a relatively simple and very inexpensive multi-touch project, so I decided that I just had to try it.

Below is the video, summarizing the creation of the multi-touch interface and some demonstration of it in use. I’m still working on my editing skills and the interface could use some fine-tuning, but I was pleased to have it actually working without a lot of effort. If you want to skip the building and commentary, jump to 3:26 in the video. It is also worth noting that Logitech didn’t have XP drivers for the camera I originally mounted in the box, so I ended up pulling that out and using a WebCam Live instead.

By all means, feel free to link to this post or share, embed, or link to the video on YouTube. Try to make one, yourself using either my method or the original (non-desk) method and post a link to your results here.

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Move Over, Microsoft Surface: Multi-Touch Computing on a Budget