Multitouch screens!

I'm sure everyone has seen that awesome video on youtube of the multitouch screen being developed at NYU (just search for multitouch and I'm sure you'll find it). Multitouch is great because it promises to be a much more expressive and intuitive interface to the PC. Simple gestures could replace the need for icon-packed toolbars (which leads to faster editing). I assumed the technology would be way out of reach for the average person to implement but after reading a few pages on how the multi-touch is accomplished, I'm thinking it might be possible to do using off the shelf technology and some programming.

Here's the list of things you need:

Acrylic sheet for the screen
IR-Hacked web cam (a 10$ off the shelf webcam will work - just remove the IR filter)
Projector (potentially optional if you just want to make a touch pad with no screen)
some IR Led's
some kind of stand to set things up on (I may build a simple one out of PVC or something)
software

As you can see the most expensive thing is the projector

Basically how it works: IR light projected from the LED's in the sides of the screen is reflected off your finger tips wherever you touch the screen. This is picked up by the webcam and the software analyzes the webcam image and determines where your fingers are. The screen is rear-projected using the projector. And that's it! So far I have the IR webcam hack working and was able to get OpenCV working to capture images from the Webcam. Next step is picking up an acrylic sheet.

I set up a mindmap for the project here which includes some helpful links and other ramblings. I'll be adding to it as time goes on.

In other news - I also got a few things done on the game engine. I made a few more event-generation functions and also Niko gave me permission to use some of his collision code in OgreOpcode. Thanks Niko!