Build Your Own Multi-Touch Surface
We’ve covered a fair amount of multitouch projects by now, and here’s another great method of building your own. It’s actually far more simple than you’d think as we showed in our 5 minute, dirt cheap multitouch example a few years back. Far from Microsoft’s $12,000 Surface technology, any hobbyist can make one as demonstrated by this tutorial.
You can put together a high responsive multi-touch surface computer using the detailed steps outlined. This is one of the more expensive ($350) and labor intensive versions we’ve seen, but the results are pretty neat as you can see from the photos and video below.
The multi-touch surface computer is a homemade wood cabinet with a transparent acrylic top. The acrylic surface sandwiches infrared LEDs which creates a layer of light within the sheet. When the surface is touched, the IR light hits the spot and reflects downward into the cabinet. A modified PlayStation 3 Eye webcam with an IR sensor captures the touches as white spots and processes it using available software on a connected PC. The processed image is signaled back to the surface using a projector.
Sounds simple in theory, but it took the team about two weeks to put it together.
Popular Multi-Touch Surface Projects:
July 28th, 2010
Credit where credit is due; This is all based on the phenomenal work of Jeff Han from several years ago (6 years). You can see examples that are almost exactly the same, but presented significantly better if you watch the talk he did at TED (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKh1Rv0PlOQ)