You May Spend Just $1 To Have A Touchscreen Computer From A Macbook If Following These Steps

Jyotis - Aug 08, 2019

It turns out that creating a touchscreen computer from a MacBook with only $1 is feasible if you try these steps the team suggests.

You are using a MacBook and want to add a touchscreen to it, but the tight budget doesn’t allow you to do this. However, the following initiative of a four-member group will show you an easy solution to turn your Apple device into a touchscreen computer. And the most important part is that you have to spend just only $1.

sistine-chapel-touchscreen — Creating a touchscreen computer from a MacBook with only $1 is now entirely possible!

The team includes Kevin Kwok, Guillermo Webster, Logan Engstrom, and Anish Athalye. Their invention combines computer vision to form their own proof-of-concept called ‘Sistine Chapel’. You may be impressed by the fact that they completed the unique product from the first step to the last step within only 16 hours.

What Are Their Materials?

In the beginning, they placed a small mirror in front of the webcam of MacBook. Their purpose is to let the camera make an angle with the laptop’s screen. As such, it could capture the image of fingers that are touching or hovering on the screen. In the next step, they leveraged computer vision to make a video feed with touch events.

It seems they had no difficulty in conducting the above steps.

And here are the materials they used:

A small mirror.

A hard paper sheet.

A hinge.

Hot glue.

Take a quick look at their product:

macbook-turn-touchscreen-computer — The small but impressive finished product!

With only these materials, they managed to bring the touchscreen experience to those who are possessing a MacBook.

Due to their installation, the camera created a tilt angle with the screen and could identify whether a finger is touching or hovering on the screen or not.

The last steps included mapping & calibrating.

The four-member team inserted the mapping of the hover/touch points which the MacBook’s webcam could pick up and form on-screen coordinates from these points.

Data is gathered based on the view of the webcam and the touched positions on the screen.

As such, the screen of the MacBook turned into a touchscreen. As in the following video, the modified screen worked well. It turns out that making a touchscreen computer from a MacBook with only $1 is not impossible at all.

The team of four friends is planning to unveil how to use a curved mirror and higher resolution webcam to improve the users’ experience with the touchscreen.